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

A few days after the fight she had tried to tell him about Sutter. They were in the soda shop and she was again placing before him a tall chrome shaker of malted milkshake. Behind him the smell of popcorn and the cedar chips from the pet cages combined with the woody clomp of customers and the sharper sound of the men along the counter clicking their silverware to make her words inaudible. What did you say? he said. I'll tell you later, she said, and then she went down the counter to tend to another customer, holding her check pad up as she walked, attentive and sure. He watched her and shook his head and went back to his milkshake.

I felt a vindication, he was saying, out on the patio, leaning back in a rusty lawn chair, bringing the beer to his lips.

She was removing a handkerchief from her hair, pulling it down around her neck and fingering the knot. Beyond her—on the edge of Tucson—the sunlight burned against the foothills.

When I kicked the shit out of that Sutter fellow, I felt it then. It's as if I knew you'd tell me that story you told, he said. He took another sip and watched as she shook her head softly to the side and then smoothed her dress against her hips, thrusting her belly out, patting it gently with the flat of her hand, turning to give him a profile view as he sipped the beer.

Ah, forget it, he said, and he meant it. He wanted to bury that night in the past with the other painful moments: standing out in the field after the duster. The spray bitter and tarlike. The bandana tied to his mouth. Mending the fences with his fingers bleeding. Leaning into the crushing weight of stubborn livestock. His father's thick hands on the belt.

I was just thinking, he said, watching as she hung the bag with the pins on the line and walked over and settled down into the chair beside him. Suddenly they were simply two more married souls on the edge of a new development; two more sharing a moment together, relishing a sensation of glory, waiting for the first stars to appear.

Where'd you come up with a word like that? she said.

A word like what? he said, patting his own belly.

Vindication, she said, smiling. He loved the look on her face. He loved her face. He loved the down on her neck. Honey, that's a look that gets me through the day, he sometimes said. When I'm folding boxes, or loading a pallet onto a truck, I think of that look. When I'm punching the clock, that's the smile that gets the card into the slot.

Just came to me, as I was thinking things over, he said.

She turned and looked beyond the yard and they settled into the kind of silence they would, later in the marriage, take for granted. Now it created a tension, a paradoxical sense of needing to speak and stay silent at the same time. But later, after a move to Cleveland, they'd feel keenly that this kind of quiet was what love became when it hardened into history, one day after another passing behind them, because that shared sense of destiny that began that night, during the fight, would never leave. It was the secret, they both liked to believe, they had shared in that first glance: a boy looking up, his face sweat-sheened and tight, and a girl looking on, pursing her lips slightly in a way she had seen in older girls, that went beyond her mother working in the Sutter household, or his own misery at the time. It was the secret of their future destiny. That's what they liked to believe. That's what they continued to believe for the rest of their lives.

You weren't thinking about vindication when it was happening. He hit you hard, if I remember correctly, and then you hit him harder, and he hit you a little bit harder and you lost that tooth, and then you happened to be the one who hit him the hardest in the end, she said.

I fought dirty. Time's gonna be the final judge, but I fought dirty.

I love you anyway, she said.

And I love you anyway, he said, feeling the cool patio stones on his bare feet.

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.