Excerpt:

They first discovered Jordan Conrad upon their return from Berta’s third husband’s funeral.

No one had been particularly shocked or moved by the death, as they had all been waiting around for it to happen. It had been a typically raucous funeral, Berta had been typically drunk, and the family was, typically, not speaking on the ride home. The drive was an unnecessarily long one that took them down a winding, abandoned highway. They were all used to this drive – the forty-five minutes it took to get anywhere and sleepy, lonely little house that waited at the end. Nine Old Highway 86 was the site of an old family plantation – a little house by the big front yard – just behind a half-mile long driveway. None of them wanted to live there anymore, but they had nowhere else to go.

When they reached the house, they were overwhelmingly horrified to see him standing on the roof of the garage.

“What in the name of our Lord Almighty is that?” Abigail leaned forward from the backseat and pointed in her son’s direction.

He’d gone to the trouble of stripping himself to his modest white briefs and he stood quite defiantly on the edge near the gutters. He may have been more appropriately accessorized with a beer or cigarette, but he left those behind with his pants, which were nowhere to be seen.

Mitchell, though only somewhat horrified, found his son’s behavior to be a perfectly rational response to waking up halfway sober in Providence, North Carolina. “Well, dear,” he explained, “It seems our son has finally come home.”

“Jordan?” Mark asked, leaning forward. The tightly wound knock-off Burberry scarf he’d been wearing all morning kept his neck from craning naturally, so his body hung awkwardly over the dashboard as he looked. “That son of a bitch.”

“Well look at that,” Berta chimed in, rotating to get a better view.

“You deal with this,” Abigail snapped as she slammed the car door.

“Well?” Mark said as he patted his father on the shoulder. “Have fun with that. I’m going to grab some lunch. Grandma, shall we?”

After a few moments alone in the car, wherein it was decided there was no “best way” to approach the matter, Mitchell reluctantly confronted his half naked son. “What the hell are you doing?” Was the first thing that came out of his mouth as he loitered in Jordan’s waning shadow.

“Defying mortality.” Jordan scratched his balls and flatly added, “Nice to see you too, Dad.”

“In your skivvies?”

“If a man’s going to go,” the boy announced, removing his hand from his crotch and lifting it towards the sky in an over-dramatic, Cesarean manner, “He may as well be naked as the day he came.”

Mitchell rubbed the back of his neck where he felt the cramp coming. “Yeah, but you’re not naked, son.”

“Close enough.”

A staunch never-nude, Jordan would never have stripped down even in the warmest of weather. The flashing of his briefs was the penultimate protest. He was not bothered by the chill in the early January air or by the bluish veins that had begun to appear beneath his bare skin.

“So, what? You’re just going to…stand there?”

Jordan broke his stare with the horizon and to look down at his father. “No, I mean, I’ll jump eventually.”

“Not much of a drop. Ten feet at best. The most that’s going to do is bruise something.”

Many had labeled Mitchell as a lackluster father – from his own father to his brother to his wife. His style of parenting had been laissez-faire at best, and aside from his current position on the rooftop, he thought Jordan had turned out normal enough.

“Am I supposed to talk you down?” He asked frankly. “I’m not going to try because you won’t listen anyway, but for the sake of your mother’s temper, I’m just going to put it out there. And how did you get up there in the first place? I don’t see a ladder anywhere.”

“Crawled up the drain pipe,” Jordan answered matter-of-factly. “That structure is a lot flimsier than I remember it being. Kind of wobbled a bit when I got onto it, and look, Dad, I’ll be fine.” Jordan tossed his head and glanced back up to the tree line. His hair had grown much longer, and Jordan’s silhouette could have easily been mistaken for one of a very flat-chested woman.

“All right. You just look like an ass up there, I want you to know.”

“I know.” Jordan shifted his weight. “Hey, what’s for lunch?”

“Whatever they brought for the funeral. The fridge has been stocked for weeks.”

“Eh, really? Another funeral?” Jordan grabbed himself again. “That didn’t take long.”

It was a valid response. Edgar had lasted only ten months after marrying Berta, and that alone was an accomplishment. Natural death or not, no man should have to die in goulash.

Mitchell dug his hands back into his pockets. “I’ll just tell your mother—“

“Abigail,” Jordan corrected.

“I’ll just tell Abigail that you’re…?”

Jordan clenched his jaw. “Don’t tell her anything,” he instructed. “Just say I’m preoccupied. Pondering the universe. Defying mortality.”

“That you’re standing half-naked on the roof, face-to-face with God? Good. I’ll see you tonight then. You might want to put the pants back on before too long; it’s supposed to get frosty.”

“Yup.”

“Great. Welcome home.”

Before entering the house, Mitchell held his breath for good luck. His son, the daring almost nude, stubbornly folded his arms across his scruffy chest. When Jordan was younger, much younger, he would have protested like this when they punished him. Only then, of course, his stubbornness would have been endearing, and he would have been wearing pants.