I

Walter Price knelt every day at three in the afternoon.

It didn't matter if it was raining. It didn't matter if he had work. It didn't matter that the mine had closed and the company store had shut down and his wife had taken the girl and left three months ago and he hadn't seen her since.

At three, he knelt.

The grave was small. A field stone with "TIMOTHY J. PRICE 1998-2012" carved into it in letters that had been painted gold once and are now peeling off in flakes. The grave was in a little patch of ground behind an abandoned church about two miles from Walter's trailer, down a dirt road that hadn't been graded since the nineties.

He knelt there. He put his hands on the stone. He stayed for ten minutes, sometimes twenty. Then he stood up and walked back to the trailer and sat in his recliner and drank beer and watched the television without looking at it.

His neighbor, a woman named Ruth, saw him do it every day. She was sixty-eight, widowed, lived alone in a small white house with a porch that had two rocking chairs and a garden that she kept even though her arthritis made her hands curl like bird claws.

"Mr. Price," she said one afternoon, watching him from her porch as he knelt at the grave in the rain. "Can I ask you something?"

Walter didn't look up.

"Are you alright? Kneeling in the rain like that."

He stood up. Water dripped from his hat. He looked at Ruth with eyes that had seen too much and not enough of anything worth seeing.

"I'm fine, Ruth."

"Did you know my husband?"

"No."

"Did you know my son?"

"No."

"Then why do you kneel?"

Walter pulled his hat down over his eyes and started walking back to his trailer. "Because."

Ruth didn't follow him. She just watched him go, this man who came from nowhere five years ago and bought the abandoned miner's cabin for cash and lived alone and knelt at her son's grave every day at three and never said much and never caused trouble and never smiled.

She wondered if he was crazy. She decided it wasn't her business.

II

The girl came to his door on a Thursday in October.

She was maybe thirty, with a face that had been pretty before something happened to it—maybe the mining town dying, maybe the husband leaving, maybe just time. She had a daughter with her, maybe eight years old, with Walter's nose and his eyes and a stubborn set to her jaw that Walter recognized because he saw it in the mirror every morning.

"Are you Walter Price?" the woman asked.

"That's what it says on the mailbox."

"My name's Diane. This is my daughter, Lily. We just moved into the old Miller place up the road. The one that's been empty since the flood."

Walter nodded. He had heard about the flood. Two years ago, the creek had overflowed its banks and taken out the lower part of town, including the Millers' house. Nobody had rebuilt. Nobody could afford to.

"We figured," Diane said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, "that maybe you could help us. The well on our property—it's dry. Or it was. We don't know how to fix wells."

Walter looked at the girl. Lily was standing behind her mother's legs, looking at him with wide eyes that didn't blink much. She had the kind of silence that comes from growing up in houses where grown-ups argue in low voices.

"Bring a bucket," Walter said.

He fixed their well in forty minutes. The pump was rusted but the mechanism was fine. He greased the seal, primed the pump, and within three minutes clear water was coming out of the spout.

Diane thanked him. She offered to cook him dinner. He said no. She looked surprised and then not surprised and then she took Lily and went back to their house.

Lily looked back at him once, over her mother's shoulder, before she closed the door.

III

Walter knelt at the grave the next day at three. It was raining again. He didn't have an umbrella. He never did.

He knelt. He put his hands on the stone. He closed his eyes.

He didn't pray. He didn't ask God for anything. He just knelt and let the rain fall on his head and the cold seep through his trousers and the silence of the grave press against his ears like water.

Sometimes he thought about talking to the boy. Not praying. Talking. Like a man talks to another man. But the words never came. They had stopped coming the day they pulled Timmy's body out of the collapsed tunnel, a small brown body wrapped in a flag that was too big for him, and put him in the ground where he still is, under a field stone with peeling gold paint.

So Walter knelt. That's what he did. He knelt because standing felt like lying. Because sitting felt like giving up. Because kneeling was the only position that told the truth: that he was grief-struck, that he was broken, that he was a man who had lost his son and couldn't fix it and would never fix it and would spend the rest of his life kneeling beside a small grave in a broken town in broken mountains and drinking beer and fixing wells for strangers.

That was the truth. Kneeling was the truth. Everything else was just noise.

IV

One evening, in late November, Lily came to his door again. She was alone. Her mother was inside, probably cooking or cleaning or doing whatever it is that women do when they are trying to keep a life together with nothing but stubbornness and determination and a well that needed fixing.

"Mr. Price?" Lily said. She was holding something behind her back.

Walter opened the door. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn that morning. He hadn't changed.

"What is it, Lily?"

She brought her hands from behind her back. It was a flower—a small white one, growing in the crack of the old foundation behind her house. "I found this. In the snow. How did it grow in the snow?"

Walter looked at the flower. It was small and white and completely out of place, pushing up through frozen ground like it had a right to be there.

"Some things grow when they want to," he said.

"Can I show you something?"

He hesitated. Then he followed her, down the dirt road, past the creek that had flooded two years ago and was now just a thin dark line in the winter landscape, to the little patch of ground behind the abandoned church.

Lily stopped at the edge of the graveyard. "Is this where your son is?"

Walter nodded.

"Can I see?"

He stepped aside. Lily walked to the grave. She looked at the stone. She read the name: TIMOTHY. She was quiet for a long time.

"My friend Sarah died last year," she said. "Her dad died too. She says he knels at her daddy's grave every day. She says he kneels in the rain and never comes inside."

"That's my boy," Walter said.

Lily turned to look at him. "Do you talk to him?"

Walter felt something in his chest tighten. "Sometimes."

"Does he talk back?"

Walter looked at the grave stone. The rain had stopped. The sky was grey and flat, like a sheet of tin. He thought about what to say. He thought about all the things he wanted to say to a boy who had been twelve and who was now buried under six feet of West Virginia dirt.

"No," he said. "He doesn't talk back."

"Then why do you go?"

Walter looked down at his boots. They were wet from the damp ground. He thought about the truth. The truth was simple and ugly and had no words big enough to hold it.

"Because," he said.

Lily nodded, like that was an answer she understood. Maybe it was. She held up the white flower. "Do you want this?"

Walter took the flower. It was cold and delicate and impossibly alive in the dead landscape around them. He placed it on the grave stone, where the peeling gold paint caught what little light there was.

"Thank you," he said.

Lily went home. Walter knelt. The rain started again. The flower stayed on the stone, small and white and stubborn, growing in the snow because it wanted to, because that's what some things do—they grow when they want to, in the frozen ground, in the broken places, where nothing else will.