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could you ever live here? It’s so blankety-blank hot.” Hot as hell, air thick as syrup, humidity stifling as steam. On the most brutal days, the barn smells like hay and horses, as if the heat awakens ghosts of the past. The tin roof is a musical instrument on a rainy day, but on a blankety-blank hot day like this one, it turns into a frying pan.
    Max and I work quietly, and the only sound is the music and then the groan of the press as he begins to print a run of birth announcements—a bunny image deeply pressed into handmade cotton paper and the name Beatrice underneath in pink foil. The particulars of her birth—date, time, and full name—scroll underneath in a custom-designed font with daisies at the edge of the letters. A pile begins to form at the edge of the press. When he takes a break, he comes around the corner and rubs his hands on a towel, where grease stains make Rorschach images on the white cotton.
    â€œWe need a new gear pedal for the Heidelberg,” he says.
    â€œI know.” I look up from my desk, and he’s already walking away. I check my cell phone again, afraid that I won’t hear it ring or beep. I review notes from an interview with an interior designer who needs a new logo. Usually, I can escape with the designs and visuals, but all I can think of is my damaged family.
    Oh, Willa, I think.
    Ours is a relationship of opposites—complex and simple. We’re eleven months apart; “Irish twins,” we’d be called if we were Irish. But we’re English through and through, Mom always bragged. Puritans all the way back to the Mayflower, if you believe her stories.
    Dad was a sales rep for small electronic parts Company, but his pride and all his attention went to his position as lay minister at Calvary Independent Church. He wasn’t the head pastor, and he didn’t get paid at all for his devotion, but he took his position as seriously as if he were in charge of the universe itself. A reverend, a minister, an elder—all of the above. For my parents life was good and bad, black and white, heaven and hell. Anything in between was of the devil, foggy and destructive. My parents moved to Savannah from New York when they were eighteen-year-old newlyweds and Dad had been assigned to the southern parts office.
    Willa and I can always claim to be southerners, as we were born in Savannah. We swam in the muck and flotsam of the Savannah River and ran barefoot through dormant cotton fields. Outside, our childhood was soaked with the joy of freedom. Inside, it was constrained by the board and batten walls of the church.
    I was six years old when Willa and I stopped fighting with each other and turned our frustration toward a common goal: the church. We sneaked out of services and covered for each other. We ripped up our Sunday school homework and said we’d lost it. We pretended to sing the hymns while saying “watermelon” over and over, smiling at Mom as if in rapture. They may have been small rebellions, but they gave us a sense of power in our powerless lives. And now, alone in the studio, I desperately want to go to the hospital and heal my sister as the elders once claimed they could do with some oil on the forehead and a prayer in babbling tongue.
    â€œSo what do you think happened?” Max asks, startling me.
    â€œWhat?” I spin my chair around.
    He laughs. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
    I rub my eyes. “I’m not going to get a damn thing done today, am I?”
    â€œWhy should you? Stop pushing it. Go see your sister.”
    I stare at him, at his brown eyes edged in blue. There’s always a first thing you notice about a person. If I look back, I can tell you what it is about almost anybody I know. For Max, it was his eyes and the way a band of deep navy surrounds the dark brown.
    â€œYou asked something.” I sit straighter. “What did you just ask me?”
    â€œWhat do you think