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

In Cleveland he'd claim: I knew it right then. I knew your name and that your ma worked for Sutter's folks. That put the fuel in me and made me want to kill that bastard. I guess I'd even go so far as to say I knew exactly what you were thinking, somehow, and had it all figured out.

Much later—maybe in Detroit, or their last year in Toledo—he'd remember it differently. He had looked at her and known intuitively that Sutter had tried some kind of funny business in the kitchen, or up in the maid quarters, or down in the laundry room, maybe shoving her back onto a pile of dirty sheets and fondling her, reaching up and under her skirt while she tried to fight back, feeling the shame and fear that came when a boy tried something with a girl, knowing that if she said anything her mother would lose her job. In later years he'd slip that into the story when they talked it over. As he aged, it seemed too much that he had beaten Sutter before he had learned the story. He had gone at Sutter not out of a sense of dignity or honor, or even because of the slight about being an Okie, and only after the fight—when the parking lot cleared and somehow he got close enough, caught up with her, tapped her shoulder, his face still bloody, his eyes bruised, and said hello, leaning forward, trying to wink but instead wincing, slightly confused somehow because she had the high, clean forehead and hairdo of a rich girl even though she wasn't—maybe he knew that much, understood that she was the daughter of the kind of woman who would do the Sutters' laundry. Who else but someone like her would appear at the end of a fight, in the lonely parking lot, and lend a hand, touching his cut and saying it needed to be stitched, simply standing there without fear at the sight of his battered face?

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.