It was the armoire, wasn't it?

For the first eighteen years of my life my family rented all of the furniture in our house, our couches, our chairs, beds, bookshelves, dressers… everything. We did this, presumably, because at any given moment we were only going to stay in Saudi Arabia for a couple more years. We were only going to stay until my dad turned 50 and then until I graduated from middle school, then boarding school came around then finally, after working for Saudi Aramco for over twenty years and with two kids heading off for college, my father decided we were probably in it for the long haul.

I should preface this story by saying that my father does not buy many new things and when he does he goes about it in the way most people go about finding a spouse. He has to court several dining sets, testing the chairs, wiggling parts, looking for anything to hate and eventually rejecting most candidates for reasons the rest of us strain to understand.
“We spend more on the cat every week than you would spend on that coffee table,” we’ll argue.
To which my father will sigh and reply smugly, “We’ll think about it.”

When my sister and I were both in middle school our family car, the 1989 Mazda Delux my father bought the year my sister was born, finally broke down on the highway as we were driving home from the mall. The car had stalled every now and then for the past couple of years and most of the paint had chipped off the front and back hoods with rust patches slowly eating through the passenger doors. Of course, this meant nothing to a man who once drove around a Volkswagen with a hole you could accidentally put your foot through if you missed the break petal. So when my sister would remind him how embarrassed she felt when her friends asked her why our gardener had his car parked in front of our house at 10 pm he would just chuckle to himself, obviously a little too amused by the idea of my sister having to explain to her friends that we didn’t have a gardener.

As the cars behind us honked impatiently, waiting for us to push our smoking Mazda to the side of the road we snapped bitterly at him, “Now can we buy a new car?”
“*sigh*…We’ll think about it.”
My father walked ten minutes every day to catch a bus to and from work for three months before we finally bought a used Camry from a family friend.

My sister and I complain but the person who has probably suffered the most is my mother, who for many years fantasized about picking out living room sets and kitchen tables but could never convince my dad to commit to anything that permanent. We would watch movies together and when the rest of us would get choked up by a tender moment she’d say,
“Do you like that orange couch? I think I want a couch like that.”
“Mama, that woman just died on that couch.”
“Maybe a little darker than that one”

Not to mention that my mother is a notoriously compulsive buyer. When my father finally realized that it would be less expensive to buy our own furniture than rent it for ten more years, she bought an entire living room and kitchen set in less than two weeks. I went shopping with her for our dining room table shortly thereafter and at the first store we went to she almost talked herself into buying a table that looked like it belonged in a torture dungeon.
“It’s nice isn’t it?! Que rústico!”
“It has nails sticking out of it.”
“We can cover those.”
“That chair is missing a leg.”
“But the other five are okay!”
“Yeah, we’ll think about it.”

It’s a good thing my father never tried to back out because if he had tried to stop her mid-buying frenzy I have no doubt he would have found himself on the wrong side of an ugly divorce. I imagined getting a phone call from her to tell us that after thirty years of marriage she had finally had enough and thoroughly unshocked I would reply, “It was the armoire, wasn’t it?”

She guards that furniture with her life and for the most part we try to abide by her rules because we know it’s going to be a long time before she gets a new set. To the best of my knowledge there had only been one major incident, when my sister sat on the armrest of one of our black leather couches, accidentally snapping the support beam. I thought my mother would never speak to her again, I had never seen her so distraught. This includes the time when two years ago on the day after Christmas I woke up and sat with her in the living room for about three hours before I noticed that the house was unusually quiet.
“Where’s Ana?” I asked.
“She went to the hospital with appendicitis,” she said without batting an eyelash.
Her child undergoing urgent surgery she can handle but when that child accidentally breaks her couch she practically has a heart attack.

She tried to fix it but a little bit of wood still angles out from the side forming a small bump under the armrest. Sometimes I’ll look over only to find her staring intently at that bump, no doubt replaying the incident over in her mind, thinking about how she could have stopped my sister and saved her beautiful couch. Now in the middle of a horror film when she sees a nice sofa or an armchair she likes she still points it out, but ads, “it’s probably better made than this one,” glancing over hopefully at my father who nods unexcitedly. And she stares back longingly at the screen, wishing she were as lucky as that girl that's about to get eaten by zombies.. her couch seems to hold up against pretty much anything.