One Tuesday, Arthur didn’t show up. Bernard sat alone. Eugene arrived late, holding a Ziploc bag. Inside was a single, tiny brass gear.

Arthur and Bernard never believed a word. But they listened. That was their real entertainment.

Arthur, a retired watchmaker, had fingers that trembled until they touched something small. He spent his weeks disassembling and reassembling a single, stubborn cuckoo clock. It had not told the correct time since 1987. He didn’t care. For him, the entertainment was the struggle—the tiny screws, the brass gears that slipped from his tweezers, the way the wooden bird sometimes lurched out mid-afternoon and screamed for no reason. That was a good day.

Not to family. To each other. They had a rotating schedule. Monday: Bernard calls Arthur to complain about the neighbor’s leaf blower. Wednesday: Arthur calls Eugene to describe the cuckoo clock’s latest seizure. Friday: Eugene calls Bernard to read aloud a grocery list he found and explain why the person who wrote it was clearly a secret agent (“Who buys capers, anchovies, and cat food? No one. That’s a code.”).

On Saturday, they had a wildcard event. Last month, they tried to build a birdhouse. It collapsed. They laughed for the first time in years. Yesterday, they went to a casino. Bernard lost forty dollars and called it “tuition in human stupidity.” Arthur won twelve cents on a slot machine and kept the payout slip in his wallet. Eugene got lost in the parking garage for two hours and said it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all year.

The next Tuesday, Arthur was back. He had a bandage on his thumb and a wild look in his eye. “The cuckoo bird escaped,” he said. “Got out the window. I chased it three blocks.”

At 11 AM, they paid their tabs—always exact change, counted twice—and walked to the park. They sat on a bench dedicated to a man named Harold who had died in 1992. No one knew Harold. They didn’t care.

Their afternoon activity: watching a single oak tree.