It really tied the room together

We had just pulled into a parking space at the big bullseye box store when her phone started to jangle.

We were on a mission (that my daughter had chosen to accept): I was redecorating my office and needed her help in finding a rug that really tied the room together. We were happy. Mother and daughter, out at the store, doing mother and daughter things.

But something wasn't right.

Her face, illuminated by the blue glow of the screen, twisted in an expression somewhere between agony and excitement.

"Duuuuuuuude."

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

I turned off the car and asked quite bluntly what was going on. She just flapped her hands and started to say words that mostly sounded aloft on a jet stream of hyperventilation and escalating screams.

“The! College! Decision! IsInMy INNNNNNNNNNNNBOX!”

And though she had applied to eleventy-billion institutions of higher education, I didn't have to ask her which decision had been finalized.

ONLY one mattered.

The only application she fussed over, wrung her hands over, and rewrote until the words sang to her in four-party harmony. The only application she paid for with her own money. The only one that's acceptance rate made her feel as if her chances were worse than a camel's trying to thread itself through the eye of a needle.

There we sat, wordlessly staring at each other, as the winter chill started to creep into the car.

“Well?”

“I'm not going to look at it now,” she said turning off the phone and opening her seatbelt with simultaneous clicks. “Let's you that rug!”

We almost made it … 

We had gone past the spring-coming Fashion; taken a right and Lingerie and a left at Bedding, and found ourselves smack in the middle of … Frames? 

Honestly, I'm not sure how we found floor coverings but we did, finally, and we had two whole aisles to choose from. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing, but I expected this trip would not only tie the room together it would join us more closely in her expertise in retail therapy.

I started the opening salvo: “Do we want natural fibers or manmade? Should I go with neutral colors? What about pulling in a color that contrasts with the couch? Would it be too loud? What do you think?”

She didn't answer.

When I looked, she was wistfully staring down into her phone.

“I have to know.”

And then I knew: This was a make-or-break moment-of-truth time. And no matter what happened – whether she broke down in tears in (I'm suddenly realizing) a painfully-well-lit department store aisle teeming with shoppers, or started jumping up and down for joy – my chances were dwindling for leaving the store with a rug. Or, it turns out, my dignity.

Because suddenly expletives were flying over the carpets into curtains. Happy, excited, celebratory curse words. She even called her dad so she could curse with him on speaker. 

Eventually, we found a rug and loaded it into the cart. We wheeled it to the checkout thinking of all the people in our lives that we couldn't tell even with full-sized words. But when we unloaded that rug from the car and unrolled it in the room it will live in, it became abundantly clear. 

This rug really tied the room together.