All the Houses by Karen Olsson

folded across his chest. He looked every bit the hard-liner. While I couldn’t say for sure based on that one image, it seemed that even his skin had a hard quality, like old rubber.
    It started to rain, and I went inside. During the short journey from the store entrance to the shelf of new releases, I started to concoct a fantasy in which I would attend the Singletary book-signing and ask piercing questions on Dad’s behalf, questions that exposed the author as full of shit. A revenge fantasy, even though I didn’t know what it was I’d be seeking retribution for: I would get back at this man I’d never met for various unspecified lies from twenty years ago? It was a desire that had less to do with Singletary than with a certain impression I had of Dad’s career. For my father hadn’t been utterly disgraced, he’d led a perfectly decent life, and still there was something I wanted to avenge. Some kernel of shame that he and maybe our whole family had never managed to disgorge: Who was responsible? Maybe this crusty would-be pundit? Once I had the actual book in hand, the specific fantasy of debunking him at his book-signing faded, for what did I know, compared to the admiral, the columnist, the CEO whose accolades appeared on the back of the dust jacket?
    The darkness outside made the store a bright shelter, and people twisted and sidled to pass one another in the narrow aisles between the shelves, readers floating in and out of worlds. A Leonard Cohen album played softly in the background. I scanned the book’s chapter titles, oblique and portentous. Saigon 1973. Phoenix Rising. Morning in Central America. The cost was $24.95. Then I saw someone I knew, or had once known.
    I didn’t even see him so much as I intuited him viscerally. An intuition of a fancy coat and the shaved back of his neck. It had been years, but his name dropped into my brain like a raider from the clouds, like a Meal Ready to Eat, even though the names of people I’d met more recently so often escaped me. Rob Golden, golden boy. At seventeen he’d been a heartthrob and well aware of it. My father and his stepfather had been friends, and so we knew him that way too. He’d gone out with Courtney for a little while, and I’d been jealous but also anointed, cool by association.
    To say he was the same, what does that mean? That he was the same person? That he had the same effect on me? A river I stepped in again, maybe. Or a pile of shit—I would argue that you actually can step in the same pile of shit twice.
    Having been around each other so long ago, it was as if we’d known each other intimately, though that was in no way the case. I’d had a crush on him, and my sister had dated him, so he’d been very present in my life for a minute or two, but I hadn’t been a part of his life at all. As though that crush had just been in remission for two decades and now had returned, I had trouble saying his name. I gurgled it—“Rob?”
    And then he turned around.
    â€œHelen?” he said, and I was all too flattered, that he remembered my name after so many years. That he’d even known it to begin with. He’d been considered gorgeous, though it was more his energy and the twinkly leer in his eyes than his features, which were slightly skewed, as though someone had come along and tried to adjust something and done a poor job of it. And he had a heavy face; it would’ve been no surprise to find he’d grown fat since high school. In fact his body was lean as a runner’s. Other than the shadow of a beard that covered his fleshy jaw, he looked exactly as he had, down to the clothes, which were the designer versions of what he might have worn in high school, high-end jeans and sneakers.
    He asked whether I lived in D.C. and told me he’d only just come back there himself. I pretended to know less than I did about him, for the truth was that news of Rob had