Excerpt from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

(As he received the punches, Sutter felt the shame of loss. Each punch established a home in some deeper, spongy part of his mind. Each punch shook a doubt loose in his brain, and before he could shove it back, another one came, and another.)

Nobody had taught Bergara how to throw a pivot blow (also known as the "rabbit" punch). He felt inventive as he pivoted and drew his arm back—in one quick fluid motion—and then rotated forward in a motion outlawed by professionals because it was deemed too mechanical, too precise, too blunt, too old-fashioned, too inelegantly elegant, and drawn too squarely in the air to fit in with the loopy, sweeping give-and-take of the sport. (He would see this punch after the fact, in a hazy retrospect, hardly remembering how it had played out until Sarah told him later, confessed softly, saying, I've never seen someone punch like that.)

Much later, he would try to justify the rage he had felt, the thoughtlessness that had overtaken him in those final moments—when the crowd, suddenly frightened, began pulling him away—by pinning it to Sarah's glance, her deep brown eyes, the way she had nodded at him over Sutter's shoulder.

Sutter called me an Okie. That's what started it all. I didn't mean to give him a concussion, or break his jaw. But like my brother told me, the only good fight is one you win, and only winning makes it a good fight. I'm sure that because your mother worked for the Sutter family, and because he was the way he was, he probably tried to make a move on you at one point or another.

* * *

A few years later, in Arizona, sitting out on the patio with a beer after working the day shift, watching Sarah lift the laundry to the line, a clothespin in her beautiful mouth, her thin arms freckled, her windblown hair bleached blond, Bergara thought about that fight, saw it filtered and bent through time, beginning with the summer romance it had inspired, driving in his truck on back roads, stopping to take the old horse blanket out of the trunk, spreading it across the warm hood, lying back against the windshield to watch for shooting stars. The fight was filtered through that night, a few weeks later, as they lay hip to hip, hand in hand, and she began to talk—her voice husky, deep, arriving out of the depths of her lovely neck, saying, Frankie, there's something I wanted to tell you, about Sutter, and he said, Yeah, go on, and she said, You were kind of right, about him making the moves on me when Mom was working at his house.

He was putting into retrospect the sight he'd caught of her in that slight lull of action, when the crowd grew quiet and stood back and waited. Just a quick glance, nothing special really. One more of those girls during a break in a fight, some spectator in a skirt and bobby socks with a fresh young face looking on with a lovely presence, lipstick bright and shiny and perfect against pale skin, pleading with her eyes, seeming to make a judgmental statement, the eyes squinting for a half second, as if trying to see into his own while saying: It isn't enough to see this fight as simply tit for tat, one guy baiting another into a rumble to pass time, to get a better sense of who was who in the pecking order. It isn't enough to explain it as a rite of passage, as something to break apart the brittle tension between the Sutters of the world—fluid with entitlement, with fresh-laundered shirts, iron creases still visible—and ranch kids with a history going back to the hop pickers (nothing worse than a fucking hop picker, his father liked to say) and the migrant crews that came for free potatoes and shelter and waited a few weeks until the hops were ripe and ready to be picked, feeling at night the firm, hard pressure of the ladder rungs under their feet, the lug of the bag strap pulling their shoulders. This has to be—her face in the crowd said—part of a wider story, and that story should include me, later, afterward, because we're gonna use it to find out that we love each other, and this fight, this first meeting of sorts, will get us talking, sharing the secretive, soft give-and-take that will come from learning that in spite of the fact that I dress well, and hold myself with a comportment, at least as you saw me in a glance, in the heat of the fight, with most of your mind on Sutter, and the bearing of a rich girl, you'll come to learn that I'm really just another poor girl on a scholarship to the Young Women's Academy, an outsider as much as you are, so that years later—right now, Bergara thought, on the patio, me and this beer and my own little house, not much but my own, and the baby on the way—you will remember this fight and look back at it remembering how we met up afterward and how I told you, as she did, saying, Momma was downstairs in the laundry room, ironing, and Sutter came up to me in the kitchen and then he started grabbing at me, playing around, yeah, but grabbing while I told him to stop it.

Excerpted from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means. Copyright © 2019 by David Means. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.