The Model House

by Joanna Grant

Even the one we ended up in was better

than anything we thought we had

the right to imagine. Even the orange

shag rug beckoned, though a little wilted,

still hung over from the Seventies when

the old part of the subdivision thrust up

after Atlanta had started to boom but before

anyone had ever fumed about the traffic downtown.

Left at loose ends and bored all summer

killing time waiting for our working mother

to finally come home and give us our dinner

we either fought or ignored each other

after the novelty of our new-ish rented house

finally wore off. Not much furniture, absent father,

kitchen smelling of lunch’s hot dog water.

We broke the frame on the mirror hung

over the sofa, casualty of one knock-down

drag-out or another. I walked to the neighbors’

house by house till I found one who’d give a

strange kid some glue. Looking inside

other people’s front doors—my new addiction.

Any excuse would do. And then I found the model house,

where the lady up front couldn’t ever say no to you

coming in to look, or at least that’s what I thought then.

So I took my first tour in my hand-me-down shoes.

I brought the littler ones, too, agog at my tales

of fireplaces that didn’t even need wood and the kind

of an island you kept in the kitchen, not in the sea.

And the realty lady kept letting us in,

giving us the works in her best grownup voice,

the whole model house tour from carport to

breakfast nook to clean-swept hardwood floors,

us four in our cousins’ faded old jeans and tees, sweaty

little hands smearing the ink on the Xeroxed floor plans

she’d let us keep. That clean model house. Stuff of our dreams.