The house, set neatly back on the...

The house, set neatly back on the lot, looked like a doll house, with its pitched roof and neat little doorway and windows. No one looking at it could know that a perfectly regular family didn’t live there--a mother, a father, and a child, each doing his job in life, each one having the best intentions toward one another and toward the world. If only . . . Ginny thought. Why couldn’t it have been right for us? Why couldn’t we be a regular family?

--From “King of the World” by Merrill Joan Gerber