I remember a weekend afternoon …
He still lived in the house …
My first days at home with Dad …
“Did I ever tell you about the time…”
I left my father at the AU campus …
When I was a kid the news was full …
I can picture Dick Mitchell’s hairy legs …
Later, in retrospect, that abortive pool party …
I went to that job on the day of Dad’s panel …
When we picked him up the following day …
“You should come up to New York with me” …
Part Two
Dick Mitchell was Dad’s best friend …
With the help of the Internet I found a place …
My father and Dick Mitchell both moved to Washington …
I had nocturnal bouts of sister-nostalgia.
Mid-August, 1986: the city …
No one else could rile me the way Courtney could.
“So Dad,” I would say to my father on the phone …
“It’s fifty percent pure bullshit” …
Nobody sleeps. The men tasked with …
My neighbor Daniel didn’t seem to observe …
Although Tim is the one who works on the NSC …
Dad had received all the usual holiday invitations …
For better or worse (in the end, probably worse) …
Christmas was a challenge …
Part Three
1986
2005
1986
2005
The next day I wished I were a wanderer …
1986–87
2005
1987
1987
2005
1987
2005
It had been so reassuring to be ferried around …
And then I was disturbed by a different piece of news …
I’m not great with endings. Neither was Lawrence E. Walsh …
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Karen Olsson
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Karen Olsson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olsson, Karen, 1972– author.
All the houses: a novel / Karen Olsson. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-28132-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71419-2 (e-book)
1. Families—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. 3. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.L755 A79 2015
813'.6—dc23
2015023333
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This is a work of imagination that draws from the historical record. Some details of the Iran-Contra Affair have been altered, and although certain characters are based on real people, here they exist in an invented world.