Thorndale
New Short Story by Jim Jonke
Mel watched the pretty girls board the train at Grand, ride to Addison, depart. They were blonde and young and some wore skirts. One of them twirled her hair between her fingers absent-mindedly while her friend talked. They were laughing at speaking loud then quietly. Mel sat kitty-corner from them and eavesdropped.
After they got off at Addison, Mel moved to where they had sat. An older woman spied him and gave him a disapproving look. He closed his eyes and tried not to think.
He opened his eyes and saw the letters HORND through the window and began to gather himself. Thorndale. One more stop to go. Stand up, adjust backpack and jacket, pat the pockets and feel for the keys and the phone. Take the phone out and check messages. Did she send me a text while I dozed? Any I missed earlier when the boss droned on in the afternoon meeting? Nothing waited for him inside his phone.
Outside the train station at Granville, Mel saw Eddie from Evanston coming from the Metropolis café. Eddie walked with purpose. If he noticed Mel by the Chinese restaurant looking dumbstruck, it didn’t show.
She hadn’t sent him a message. What was Eddie doing in the neighborhood?
He couldn’t go home. Better to follow Eddie from a discreet distance. It was possible that Eddie had another woman in Edgewater, or maybe he had other business in the area. Maybe he was killing time while the mechanic worked on his car. Anything is possible.
Half a block west on Granville past Broadway, Eddie stopped. Mel panicked and tried to duck behind a tree. It gave poor cover. Eddie needed only to turn around and he’d have seen Mel looking foolish behind the skinny tree. Thankfully, Eddie was only stopping to pick up something that had fallen from his coat pocket. Mel wished for the vision to see what it was.
They reached Glenwood, Eddie arriving first. Mel watched him take out his phone and play with it then place it to his ear. A short time passed, then Sylvia met Eddie on the street. She had on the green dress Mel had bought her for their anniversary a year back. It was too cool for the dress, but she wore it anyway. They greeted each other tentatively, looked around, and went up the stairs. Mel had been after the landlord to fix the buzzer for a few weeks, but it was clearly still inoperative. He was glad at that moment that the request had been ignored. He wanted to see her with his own eyes. He now had a glimpse of them together, what they looked like standing next to each other. It didn’t take much for him to imagine the rest.
He walked back toward the station unsure of his next steps. He had it in his mind to get a drink, but the Sovereign was closed for repairs. There’s always the Anvil. Better than the others on Broadway that were too loud and full of college students. He entered the Anvil and asked for a whiskey with ice and became frustrated when the bartender asked him which whiskey.
“It doesn’t matter. Jim Beam.”
A few men were in the bar drinking slowly and reading magazines. Mel’s idea of a gay bar didn’t match the environment. He had always avoided the Anvil out of something he refused to call homophobia, more a sense that he had no purpose there. Despite being fully aware that the bar was not for him, he never felt the need to knock the place the way his neighbors did. His friend Doug reminded him that the neighborhood was full of young children who didn’t need to hear the sounds of aging homosexuals carrying on.
The whiskey felt good but he wasn’t in the mood to stick around. He went back to Broadway and turned south toward Thorndale and made a quick stop for a taco. Why not?
Thirty minutes later, he left the taqueria and continued south until he reached Thorndale, turned east and walked until the he was at the lake. It was dusk now, chilly and windy. The waves were small but their crash was dramatic. He had driven down Sheridan past this park the night before and seen an animal that might have been a stray dog, though he felt sure it was a coyote. What was a coyote doing in Chicago? He mentioned it to a coworker who told him that all kinds of animals lived in the city, coyotes included.
“The mayor knows about it but he lets them roam to keep the rat population under control.”
This seemed ridiculous, but Mel nodded and uttered a polite, “You don’t say.”
If there was a coyote in the park, it might be wise to leave, but Mel decided that it was more likely a dog he’d seen and that it might be a good idea to stick around and find the poor thing. Be useful. Reunite the poor lost dog with its owner. Or maybe bring it home to Sylvia. Look what I found!
He walked the length of the park to Loyola University and back until he recognized his starting point. All he saw were squirrels, so he left the park and headed west on Thorndale. He realized he had nowhere to go but home. He checked his phone. No messages. The hell with it.
At the corner of Granville and Glenwood, he saw the lights on in his apartment. He hoped to see bodies passing across the window. He wanted a cigarette but had quit the week before. It was a short walk to the drugstore. He could buy a pack, smoke one or two and throw the rest away. But he’d walked enough for one night. He just wanted to go home. Why wouldn’t she call? Why hadn’t she sent him a warning text? Was his phone working? He placed a call to the office and listened to it ring four, five, six times before he heard his own voice telling him that he was away from his desk but to leave a message and he’d call back at his earliest convenience. Maybe she had meant to send him a text but forgot. Or, more likely, she typed a message and thought she’d hit send but had missed the button. She was no good at texting. Her fingers fumbled and her messages were full of misspelled words and incorrect punctuation marks. She had tried to warn him, but she made a mistake. And now he was stuck with nowhere to go.
He scrolled through his contacts and called Doug. He got voicemail and hung up without leaving a message. Who else? Bill? Jamie? Steve? Yes, Steve. He tried Steve. No answer. No one answers their phone these days. He didn’t blame them. He never answered unless it was Sylvia calling. Anyway, what would he have said to Doug or Steve? He regretted having placed the calls. One of them was likely to call back. Then it would be his turn to not answer. And then a series of pointless text messages. The smallest action causes all this trouble.
It was close to 8:30. He was still hungry. And he wanted very much to pour a drink in his kitchen, take it to his favorite chair in the living room and watch a few hours of Netflix, then take a warm shower and go to bed with his book. Sylvia was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was reading a disappointing Steinbeck novel. They would talk about the books they were reading, the bad programs on Netflix, the bills that could wait another week, and maybe get into an argument about how to spend the weekend. Mel didn’t want to go to the party for her niece. Their niece, really, but it always seemed like she was Sylvia’s niece alone. He had nothing to say to the girl or his in-laws and spent most parties sitting in the corner waiting for the party to end. The small argument would last for a day or so and they might even say terrible things. Then he would cave and she would apologize and they would laugh about the fight on the way to his in-law’s home. She’d tell him she appreciated him coming along and that she would make it up to him. Next weekend they could do whatever he wanted. Next weekend was his. And they would go home and sleep in the warmth of each other that seemed always so much bigger.
Jim Jonke is the author of the chapbook RayMan and the short story collection Nude Descending Escalator. He lives and works in Chicago.
For more stories, essays, interviews, and general nonsense, please visit jabberthemag.com.