Chapter 8: The Windmill

"Not one Winship card," I repeated.

"I'm sorry, kid. I've got four guys with families. They hold my paper now."

"It's not your fault."

"Tell the grandson it's not his either. Not all of it." He sniffed. "Tell him his grandfather would've driven down here and hit somebody."

He hung up.

I sat on the studio floor with the phone in my lap.

The show was in five weeks.

We had sixteen finished cards, a gold sign, a prepaid booth, and nothing to print them on.

I called Pip.

By ten that Saturday morning, eight of us were in the studio in sweatpants.

Nobody had asked them to come. Pip had texted the group one word, PRINTER, and they'd come.

"We go to a print shop," one of the artists said.

"Which one? Halvern's buying paper anywhere that'll sell it to them," Pip said.

"Online, then."

"For hand-lettered cards with gold foil? In five weeks? At show quality?"

Nobody had an answer.

The junior writer raised her hand.

"What about the windmill?"

Everyone turned and looked at her.

"The what?"

"The press in the back room. The old man showed it to me my first week. He called it the windmill."

I'd forgotten it existed.

The back room was behind accounts, past the copier, behind a door with a dead plant in front of it.

Pip moved the plant.

The room smelled like dust, oil and old paper.

In the middle of it, under a canvas sheet, stood a black iron machine the size of a refrigerator.

Pip pulled the sheet off.

It was a Heidelberg platen press, nineteen fifties, black and gold.

Two long arms crossed in front of it.

"That's why he called it the windmill," the junior writer said softly. "The arms go round."

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