Model Home

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Lately I think of my husband as a disappointment turducken: a lack of ambition wrapped in a beer gut wrapped in a statement tee designed for a much fitter man.

Over four seasons I’ve come to know that this is the way of things. Only one-half of a couple ever longs to be on a show about home renovation.

we understand better than anyone what the homeowners of the heartland want and need. Every day, people beg us to take them on as private clients, but we don’t do that anymore.

For once, they’ll feel important. Famous in their own little corner of the world.

The memory of those years when we didn’t have enough will always burn in me.

When we sometimes had to eat cereal for dinner and tried to portray it as a fun treat. I’ve never felt like such a failure. Like I’d done to them precisely the thing I wanted most to avoid from my own childhood.

house was meant to provide shelter, not a means of making up for your every deficiency.

don’t care that much where I live, you know? It’s more about how I live. Who I live with. If those things are good, I have no complaints. And they are, they’re good.”

It must be exhausting, living in this made-up world all the time. I don’t know how you stand it.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have focused so much on making a perfect family home for my girls and should have focused instead on just making a family.

Margot is the mother I never had. True, I pay her 10 percent of everything I make, but I’d happily pay that to my own mother if she nurtured me the way Margot does.

It feels familiar. I realize it looks like every movie scene in which two people who previously loved each other sign divorce papers. I don’t know if he’s having the same thought, but our eyes meet, and neither of us looks away. Eventually, both our faces break into soft smiles. It feels like unearthing some treasure you were certain you’d never see again from an endless sandy beach. Impossible, and yet there it is.