The Prodigal Daughter

By J.P. Garland

Beth Jenkins, raised in an Irish Catholic family outside Chicago, with her father a retired Chicago cop, would not acknowledge to her family that she was gay, fearing how they would react. She moved to New York, visiting her home occasionally. At Christmas just over three years before the story begins, and against her better judgment, she responds to the when-I-you-going-to-find-a-man question by coming out.

Any hopes of staying are shattered when her father says he will not sit at the same table with this creature. For three years she speaks to neither her parents. Then her sister calls. "Dad is dying. He's turned over a new leaf." She agrees to come, but only with her girlfriend, with whom she is living in Brooklyn.

This is the story of their journey to Beth's home and what happens when she gets there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005002084

Book preview

The Prodigal Daughter

By J.P. Garland

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Copyright © 2019 Joseph P. Garland

All rights reserved.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

Cover photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash.com

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Contents

Eve Kendall and Me

A Sister’s Lie

The Lake Shore Limited

Ghosts

A Dying Man’s Room

Going Home

Home Again

Mel’s Folks

Marriage

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Eve Kendall and Me

Eve Kendall. Why I am on a train heading from New York to Chicago can be understood in reference to Eve Kendall. She was a character played by Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. She meets Roger O. Thornhill—Cary Grant—on a train from New York to Chicago. He happens to be on the run from the police (and James Mason) and sneaks onto the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central. They meet in the dining car and, realizing his predicament, she hides him in her compartment. Where they spend the night. And it being Hitchcock, a lot of stuff happens. This is the one that ends up at Mount Rushmore.

That movie, which I first saw when I was sixteen or seventeen, is one of my favorites. But I did not want to be Eve Kendall. I wanted to be Roger Thornhill doing whatever he was doing to the gorgeous blonde Eve Kendall. It led to a lifelong love of train travel.

Me? My name is Beth Jenkins. I am twenty-nine and work as a graphic designer in a large Manhattan law firm. I grew up northwest of Chicago.

And the train? I was going to my former house. I was going because I received a call two days before from my dear sister Marcie. My father—who I neither saw nor spoke to in over three years—wanted very much to see me, she said. He was fading fast and it was time for us to make peace.

Why hadn’t we spoken in three years? I am gay. When I was last home at Christmas over three years before, I was not in a committed relationship but one reason I moved to New