Men and Dogs (26 page)
Authors: Katie Crouch
“Up Fell. Left on Masonic, OK? Sorry, but keep going, then turn—just, yeah. Keep going. Keep going. Sorry, here’s a twenty,
keep the change. Don’t have much more than that—we’re bankrupt! I know, we’re all in this together. So, anyway, good luck,
then. OK, bye.”
Is her husband home? He must be. She still doesn’t have the new key, but his car’s there, and this time she’s got the right shoes for climbing.
She looks up the fire escape, considering. A wiser person, she knows, wouldn’t do this. There are so many reasons not to.
She’s already mined this marriage bare; Jon has made that clear. There’s a divorce on the table, and this could definitely be used against her. Plus, Denise might be up there . . . or worse.
But what Hannah knows now is that she is gloriously and terminally faithful. She is someone who believes, even when others do not. If you’re a dog, that means waiting for days in a boat for your owner to come back out of the ocean. If you’re a woman,
it might mean scaling a building to tell your husband you still love him, whether or not he’s ready to hear you yet.
There won’t always be a why,
her father once called from the water.
She’s climbing up high above her city. She’s opening the door, shouting, turning on every light.
Katie Crouch is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling novel
Girls in Trucks.
Her writing has also appeared in the
New York Observer, Tin House,
and
McSweeney’s.
She received her MFA from Columbia University and was awarded a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in San Francisco.