Excerpt: Family and Other Strangers

Jordan stands on top of their two-story house, a hand shading his eyes from the mid-morning sun. He’s gone to the trouble of stripping himself to his modest white briefs and he stands quite defiantly on the edge near the gutters. He may have been more appropriately accessorized with a beer or cigarette, but he seems to have left them behind with his pants. For now it is partial nudity and death wishes.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mitchell yells as he stands beneath his son’s waxing shadow.

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

“In your skivvies?”

“If a man’s going to go,” he announces, 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 he entered.”

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

“Close enough.”

Mitchell watches his son rest his hands on his waist and remained perfectly erect, staring into the distance. “So, what? You’re just going to…stand there?”

Jordan breaks his stare with the horizon and looks down at his father. “No, I mean, I’ll jump eventually. That’s kind of the whole point.”

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

“Your point?”

Mitchell pulls his hands out of his pockets and frankly asks, “Am I supposed to talk you down? 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,” he answers 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 tosses his head and glances back up to the tree line. His hair is getting longer now, and from the backdrop of the rising sun, Jordan’s silhouette could have easily been mistaken for one of a very flat-chested woman.

“All right. You just…you look like an ass up there.”

“Probably.” Jordan shifts his weight slightly to the left, back to the right, into the center, before deciding on a classic controposto. “Hey, what’s for lunch?”

“Whatever Abigail’s friends bring for the funeral.”

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

It was a valid response. Edgar 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.

“You want me to save you something?”

“I’ll pass. Afraid to take my chances. I brought some tomatoes for the ride”

“You left tomatoes in your car for two days?”

“Twelve hours, Dad. New York is only twelve hours away, not that you’d know.”

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

“Abigail,” Jordan corrects.

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

Jordan lifts his head a bit higher. First his jaw clenches, “Don’t tell her anything,” then his fist tightens, “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, ah, see you tonight then. You might want to put the pants back on before too long; it’s supposed to be frosty.” Mitchell says, one eyebrow lifted in that every-other-gesture-would-be-wasted kind of way.

“Yup.”

“Great. Welcome home.”

Before entering the house, he holds his breath for good luck. His son, the burgeoning nudist, stubbornly folds his arms across his scruffy chest. When Jordan was younger, much younger, he would protest like this whenever they punished him. Only then, of course, his stubbornness would have been endearing and he would have been wearing pants.