The factory had been closed for three years when Billy Harper Jr. started working there, which was ironic because the only thing being manufactured in those rusted walls anymore was regret. It was 2003, and the town—whatever it was called, Billy couldn't remember, didn't care, probably had a name that sounded like somewhere else and meant nothing to anyone who lived there—was the kind of place where the sky was permanently the colour of a dirty dishrag and the only thing growing between the cracked sidewalks was dandelion and despair.

Billy was thirty years old, and he had been born in a hospital that was now a parking lot, raised by a man named Billy Harper who had found him in a pile of rubble behind a demolished building and decided, for reasons nobody ever understood, that he was going to keep him. Old Billy worked at a funeral home before he retired, which was fitting because the younger Billy had always had a knack for knowing when people were going to die.

Not in a supernatural way. Not exactly. It was more like a feeling, like the way you know someone is standing behind you even though you can't see them, or the way you know a storm is coming even though the sky is clear. He could feel it in his gut, a cold heavy stone that dropped into his stomach when someone was close to the end, and the closer they got, the heavier it got, until it was so heavy he could barely walk.

He didn't tell anyone about it. What was the point? People didn't want to know. People wanted to believe they had time, that tomorrow was guaranteed, that the coffee they were drinking this morning would still be warm when they came home from work tonight. He didn't have that luxury. He had the stone, and he had the knowing, and he had the stubborn refusal to bow to anyone who carried it.

Because that was the thing—he wouldn't bow. Not to his boss at the warehouse (which was really just a fancy word for "place where you stack boxes until someone smarter moves them somewhere else"), not to the priest at the church (which was really just a fancy word for "place where people go to pretend they're not afraid of dying"), not to anyone. When people told him to bend over, to show respect, to acknowledge that they were bigger and better and more important than him, he just stood there, hands in his pockets, face like stone, and said nothing.

Some people called it disrespect. He called it survival.

Nancy Ross worked at a bar called The Rusty Nail, which was named after something that used to be important but was now just rust and memory, like everything else in this town. She was twenty-eight, with dark hair and dark eyes and a voice that sounded like it had been trained on black coffee and broken promises, and she sang on Friday and Saturday nights to crowds that were mostly empty and occasionally full and always the same.

Billy went to hear her sing because the bar was warm and the whiskey was cheap and her voice made the stone in his stomach go quiet for a few hours. He sat in the back corner, drank his beer, and listened, and never spoke to her, because speaking was for people who had something to say and Billy had nothing to say that anyone would want to hear.

One night, some drunk from out of town came in and started bothering her, saying things that made Billy's skin crawl and his fists clench. The drunk was big, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of bad decisions and worse intentions, and he had three friends who were equally big and equally bad. Billy stood up. He didn't say anything. He just walked over, put his hand on the drunk's shoulder, and said, "Leave her alone."

The drunk turned around, surprised, and smiled a smile that was all teeth and no humor. "Or what, little man? You gonna make me?"

Billy didn't answer. He just hit him. Once, in the stomach, where it hurt the most. The drunk folded like a lawn chair, and Billy put him on the floor and stood over him and said, "I told you to leave her alone."

The drunk's friends didn't do anything. They just watched, wide-eyed, like they had never seen someone stand up to a guy like the drunk before, which made Billy laugh, because everyone in this town knew you didn't stand up to anyone. You bent. You bowed. You took it.

The drunk got up and left. His friends followed. Nancy came out from behind the bar and looked at Billy like he was some kind of alien species that had just landed in the middle of her parking lot.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"That wasn't nothing. That was—"

"Stupid. Reckless. Pointless. You can fill in the rest."

She studied him for a long moment. "Why did you do it?"

"Because nobody else would."

She smiled. It was a sad smile, but it was real. "You're a strange guy, Billy."

"I know."

"Want to get dinner sometime? Real dinner. Not this bar business."

He wanted to say yes. God help him, he wanted to say yes more than he had wanted anything in years. But he couldn't.

"I can't," he said.

"Why not? You don't have to—"

"It's not about what I have to do. It's about what I can't do." He looked down at his hands, calloused and scarred and useless for anything except stacking boxes and throwing punches. "I've already knelt for this life. I don't have anything left to give."

She didn't understand. Nobody ever did.

Old Billy Harper died on a Tuesday morning in November, quietly in his sleep, the way he had lived his life—without fanfare, without complaint, without asking for anything from anyone. He was seventy years old, and he had been Billy's father in every way that mattered, even though he hadn't given him life, he had given him everything else.

At the funeral, Billy knelt beside the grave. He knelt because his father had been a man who had spent his life preparing other people for death and had never once asked anyone to prepare him for it. He knelt because his father had loved him without condition, even though Billy had given him very little to love. He knelt because his father had died without knowing that the son he had raised had spent every day of his life trying to be worthy of that love and failing.

He knelt because the dead deserved it.

Nancy came to the funeral. She stood at the edge of the crowd, watching Billy kneel in the dirt beside the grave, his shoulders shaking, his face pressed into the earth like a man trying to hide from a world that had never been kind to him.

She didn't speak. She just stood there and watched the wind blow across the empty parking lot where the hospital used to be, and she thought about the way his voice sounded when he said, "I've already knelt for this life," and she thought about how much she wanted to tell him that kneeling wasn't the same as giving up, that sometimes kneeling was the bravest thing a person could do, that maybe, just maybe, he had more left to give than he thought.

But she didn't say any of that. She just watched him kneel, and she waited, and when he finally stood up and turned around and looked at her with eyes that were red and hollow and older than thirty years had any right to be, she walked over and took his hand and squeezed it once, hard, and then let go.

Billy went back to the warehouse the next Monday. He stacked boxes and drank his coffee and never bowed. But sometimes, late at night, when the sky was the colour of a dirty dishrag and the only thing growing between the cracked sidewalks was dandelion and despair, he would close his eyes and hear Nancy's voice singing in a bar that smelled like rust and regret, and he would feel something he had not felt in years.

Not hope. Something better.

The memory of it.