My mother is the queen of graph paper. As in, she’s the only person I know who even knows what to do with the stuff, keeping some handy at all times. I don’t believe she’s ever purchased or even simply moved a piece of furniture without having first accosted it with the tape measure and mapped it out on graph paper. This is the woman who, when I moved to Orlando after college, had already graphed my entire apartment bedroom, including furniture I did not yet have, before I ever even laid eyes on the place. Do you think I deviated from the plan by even an inch? Of course not. I never questioned whether there was a better arrangement because her graph paper said there was not. She even had things optimized for proximity to electrical outlets. Forget about fancy AutoCAD software. A clean sheet of graph paper is all that is required.

So we all should have known, when she decided last weekend to lay out a rug upstairs in her new house, especially when we learned that graph paper had been involved, that there was no way it wasn’t going to work. But some of us, including and especially the person who has been married to her for 38 years, never learn, and we all thought we had a better way to build the mousetrap. And in my family, when we think we are right, we can be a snippy bunch. Thank goodness my sister and I were there, because I think our laughter is the only thing that saved my parents from bloodshed.

It all began because my sister and I and my dad were available to help roll out the rug and position it under the furniture that was already inconveniently in place. This begs the question: whose bright idea was it to lay the rug AFTER the furniture had already been moved in? Kent, handily, had gone to bed with the kids, so he missed out on all the fun. Though how they slept through the whole thing, I’ll never know, since all the screaming and yelling (and laughing) was taking place right outside the bedroom doors.

The positioning of the rug required lifting the couch, which is where the problems started. Some of us wanted to lift one side of the couch at a time. Others wanted to lift the whole thing and hold it aloft while the rug was unfurled underneath. Still others wanted to move it out of the way altogether until “The Boss” (aka Mommie Dearest) pronounced the rug satisfactorily arranged according to her exacting specifications. My dad at first missed the whole point that the rug was supposed to be laid out fashionably askew and argued that it couldn’t be done. Oh, but it could—it was on GRAPH PAPER, for crying out loud!

We finally got the rug in place, but it was, of course, at the wrong angle. Amateurs, every one of us. Two of the corners were supposed to brush adjacent walls, rotated precisely so that one side of the rug grazed the corner of a bookcase on the opposite wall, just so. Instead, we missed the bookcase by a mile, and one corner of the rug lapped up onto to the wall by a good six inches, at least. We knew it could work, because my mother’s graph paper proclaimed it to be so. So we had to start over. Several times. We just could not coax that recalcitrant rug into its proper plotted position.

Throughout the ordeal we each had strong opinions about how it should be done, and we weren’t afraid to express them. Evil looks and sharp words were exchanged. We argued over which direction and how far to pull the rug. We argued over the degree of rotation that would result in the correct alignment of the rug with the walls and furniture. We argued over who should lift each end of the couch and when, or whether it really even needed to be lifted at all. Couldn’t we just lift one corner and then twist the rug into position around the other leg? The correct answer is no, we could not, though my sister generously agreed to test this theory, just to keep the peace.

Pop. Thud.

Oops, that was a leg breaking off the couch. So much for the “twisting the rug” theory.

At some point my sister’s husband returned from an errand and was quickly ushered upstairs to mediate. He immediately assisted in breaking off another leg. And another one. We reattached them, but did I mention the potential for bloodshed? Except by this point, all we could do was laugh until it hurt. It had become a comedy of errors such as we had not experienced in a long time. Everything we tried went wrong. Yet in the end, the graph paper prevailed, and we DID wrestle that rug into submission. If my mother ever changes her mind about where she wants the thing, though, I’m so outta there. But I’ll do one parting favor as I leave. I’ll promise to call 911 to report the ensuing murder-suicide.

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Miraculously, no family members suffered bodily harm during the events depicted here. And all involved have confirmed that this is an accurate account of what transpired. Though to be fair, my husband claims he did NOT sleep through the whole thing; that no one could have slept through that. He says he was awake but remained wisely hidden in bed.