Jacinda dons a cool expression, a veil between her and her husband, and time uncoils. She is twenty-three again, scuttling into a Saskatchewan courthouse in pink eyeshadow and a wedding dress one might guess was made of mascarpone cheese. The memory leaves a sour taste.

“I need you to do something,” she says, in the present, where sunshine pelts a brownish backyard, and a lawn sprinkler spurts doggedly.

Dave does not look up from his tomato plant. “Shoot.” After flooding the planter, he swaps the watering can for a pair of shears from the dusty patio table and tramps across the yard to snip away at a raspberry bush, which has bowed to the sun.

“I’ve got work tonight. Sancho needs his pill at six. He has to take them twelve hours apart, remember? It has to be at six.”

“Jacinda, girl. You know me,” Dave says, and half the raspberry bush amasses at his feet.

Yes, she thinks. Yes, I do. “This is about our dog.”

“But I don’t believe in any of that.”

When Dave renounced working, he also renounced time. He obliterated his watch with a hammer. He covered the microwave clock with hockey tape. He began eschewing social invitations, insisting that in his time zone, Dave Standard Time (DST), nobody made plans.

Jacinda, who follows Mountain Daylight Time (MDT), breathes some calm into her voice. “I’d ask Joe”—the next-door neighbour, a sinewy, widowed carpenter, sometimes offers his sawdusted shoulder for Jacinda to cry on—“but he’s out tonight. My sister can’t come. There’s nobody else.” She beams a soldering look at the back of Dave’s head. He still has not met her eye. Instead, he finds a trowel and scoops soil from the flower bed for no apparent reason.

Jacinda pulls a battery-powered alarm clock from her purse and slams it on the patio table. “I set this for six. You don’t have to look at it. You don’t even have to think about it. All you have to do is hear the alarm, go inside, and give Sancho his medicine.”

“But then I’ll know what time it is, which defeats the whole point.”

“The whole point.” Jacinda’s back prickles with sweat.

“It’s a matter of principle. Principle, Jace. Everybody’s got somewhere to be. Everybody’s rushing.” Dave waves his trowel through the air, hurling clods of pale, overbaked earth as he speaks. “Everybody’s keeping time, but nobody’s got any. Explain that one to me.”

A basset hound lumbers through the open backdoor, ears and belly fat swinging, and tucks himself beneath the table. His eyes are cloudy, his knees distended. A fist tightens around Jacinda’s heart.

“Alright,” she says. “What’s it gonna take? Cookies? Pie?”

Dave’s eyes flash upward.

“Pie it is,” Jacinda says.

“Saskatoon berry?”

Jacinda can’t believe it’s come to this. “Saskatoon berry,” she says, and turns on her heel.

“Don’t forget the timer,” he calls after her. “You always leave it in too long.”