Puncher

File this under "Speculative, Semi-autobiographical, Historical Fiction."

*****

Puncher

They had lost touch over the years, but recently renewed correspondence. After weeks of exchanging letters, she wrote to him that she would be passing through the city where he lived, and would he like to join her for dinner?

            She arrived at the restaurant early, and as she waited, she worried. Had it been too long to rekindle their friendship? What if they didn’t like each other in person anymore? She imagined herself as she was the last time she saw him, and squirmed in her seat. She glimpsed herself in a mirror across the dining room, behind the bar. She grabbed the waiter by the arm as he passed, and ordered a diet soda.

            When he arrived at the restaurant, he looked much as he had before, but not entirely untouched by time. He was rounder and softer in his middle. His hair was thinner on top, and cut short—likely an effort to camouflage its loss of volume. He smiled, and they hugged, and he sat across from her.

            “I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize you,” she joked.

            He laughed. “I’m the same old Brian,” he told her.

            The waiter arrived for his drink order, and Brian punched him hard in the stomach. The waiter crumpled to the floor. She gasped, and stared at her friend in confused horror.

            “What?” he said to her. “I’m still the same old Brian. Except now I punch people. That’s why people call me Puncher.”

            She didn’t reply. On the floor, the waiter groaned.

            Brian shrugged. “People change, Emily.”

* * *

           As they waited for their entrees to arrive, Brian recounted for her the last several years of his life. His anecdotes were unnecessarily detailed (she didn’t need to know the names of each and every one of his co-workers, for example), as they had always been. She was comforted by this consistency, and nearly able to reconcile the affable neurotic with whom she had so often drunk so many domestic beers with the man sitting across from her now, who had physically assaulted the waitstaff not ten minutes before. She nodded as he spoke, suppressed a smile as he struggled to recall the name of the café where he first met his ex-girlfriend. “Something with an ‘R’ in it…” he said, frowning.

           As he continued to speak Emily noticed gaps in his narrative—detailed as it was—that could only be intentional. Knowing him as she did, she knew that he likely thought his story seamless, but he drove the conversation around certain topics like they were divots in a dirt road. When people had started calling him Puncher, for one.

           She didn’t ask him to fill the gaps, though. The selective retelling of personal history was, she thought, the right of the historian. Emily supposed that when it was her turn, she too would leave a few divots in the road.

           When the waiter arrived with their plates he spoke only to Emily, but never took his eyes off Brian. He hadn’t yet tucked the tail of his white shirt back into his pants. When Emily told him no, they wouldn’t need anything else right away, the waiter was visibly relieved. He disappeared back into the kitchen.

           As they ate, Emily told Brian about her job, her current relationship. She became distracted by his knuckles, which had become knotty and scarred since she had last seen them. When she noticed him noticing her looking, she blushed and turned her attention to the chicken breast in front of her.

* * *

           They ordered a piece of cake to share, and talked about people they used to know together. A man a little younger than them (a bruise fading beneath his eye) noticed Brian from the bar, smiled, and called out to him: “Puncher!”

           Brian’s left hand immediately clenched into a fist around his fork. He began to stand, and then glanced at Emily. Reluctantly, he sat back down.

           “Who’s that?” she asked, nodding at the bar.

           Brian shook his head. “Just someone I know from work.”

           “Do you have some sort of problem with one another?”

           He blinked at her. “Not at all. I was an usher at his wedding. Why?”

           She shrugged.

* * *

           They stood in the entryway, their coats on, beginning good-byes that bent and twisted back into conversation. Were they still friends? She supposed so.

           Beyond the restaurant’s glass doors, on the sidewalk, a boy and a girl in their early twenties wobbled into each other, laughing about some damn thing or another. They had the gait and obnoxious volume of happy drunks. Emily and Brian watched them through the doors. The pair was doubled over now, leaning on each other and gasping between guffaws.

           Emily could see the muscles of Brian’s jaw working. She looked at his hands, balled and white-knuckled at his waist, and then caught sight of her own. She was surprised to find her fingernails digging into her palms, the little veins on the back of her hands pressed up against her skin. When she looked up, she found Brian’s eyes, which were suddenly very familiar. They exchanged a weary smile. He held the door, and they both came out swinging.