Retirement had come easy for Emery. He got it relatively young, having worked for General Motors since he hopped out of high school, and they had cut a deal for a few of their employees as looming pensions began to scare the company. Emery got to retire early as long as they took a sizeable chunk out of his set pension. Emery had never needed much, and looking at what he had already saved, made the decision to quit working for the first time since he was thirteen. Retirement was as easy as work was. There is a special kind of laziness that can also drive people to be reliable employees. It was a social laziness. Emery, after all that had happened in his life, desired simplicity above all else. He understood what was required of him to maintain his level of comfort in society and did what he had to do to make that work. He worked so that when he got home he could sit down on a couch and not worry. He accepted the inevitability of work and vowed to do no more than he had to, but did what he did have to do unflinchingly.

It was one o’clock in the morning, on the cusp of daylight-saving time. It was the free hour. Past the final tick of one fifty-nine the hour would purge itself and be reset. Emery was only aware of it because a late-night talk show host had brushed on it as a joke setup during the monologue. The extra hour made Emery feel nothing but a slight justification to stay up even later.

In New York City, Emery’s daughter Carrie sat on a wooden floor at a coffee table in a semicircle around a television with her boyfriend and other friends. It was two in the morning, and everyone in the room was experiencing a waning drunk, where every additional beer became a decision. She sat in between her boyfriend’s legs, who sat on the couch.

The extra hour had been the reason for all of them to go to the bar, come back, drink more, in the way that any event, no matter how mundane, can be used as a structure for makeshift celebrations. The extra hour was buffer armor toward the next day.