Remarriage

I was happy when my father remarried. He had tried to hide how deeply he felt Mom's absence in the years since she passed, but I knew better. Sometimes I'd catch sight of him staring into framed photographs of Mom in her wedding dress, beaming with the warm smile cancer had snuffed out, and Dad would wipe the tears from his eyes and I would pretend not to notice. But he could never fully disguise the sadness that appeared on his face even in times of joy—birthday parties, holiday dinners, graduation ceremonies—and so when he sat me down to tell me that he'd met someone I was eager to learn more.
Iris was a godsend. Clever and artistic, soft spoken and well-read, a gifted cook with a green thumb and an open heart—she was perfect for my father, and I liked her so much that I made regular trips from my apartment two hours away to visit them. Before I knew it, they were engaged and I was helping Iris move into my childhood house.
Some thought they were moving too fast, but I bade all naysayers no mind. The widowed are always scrutinized. They exchanged their vows at home, next to the new garden they'd built together, in an emotional, beautiful ceremony to celebrate the beginning of the rest of their lives.
Imagine my horror when I received a world-shattering call only weeks later: Dad was dead. Iris had killed him.
I implored the police to listen to me. Iris would never do such a thing. It wasn't in her nature. No, I didn't know about the constant fighting or her escalating drinking habit, but what did any of that matter? They loved each other.
But I fell silent when they presented me with their case: her clothes soaked with an incriminating shade of red, the staggering amount of booze in her bloodstream, and my father's stabbed corpse in the upstairs bathtub.
I refused all opportunities to speak to her. There was no trial; she chose to plead guilty and spare herself the spectacle.
As I scattered Dad's ashes in the overgrown garden, I thought of him and his wives.
I thought of how he'd been unfaithful to Mom even as disease gnawed away at her body and left her crying out for him, and how I loathed the guilty tears he shed at her funeral.
I thought of how I overheard Iris telling my father of her past struggles with alcoholism, and how my private investigator produced a startling record of violence she committed while inebriated and under another name.
I thought of my grief, of all the years I swallowed my anger and disgust towards my father, and how for so long I had wanted to wound him just as he'd wounded Mom.
But most of all I thought of the garden wedding, when I had taken Iris aside, welcomed her to the family, and quietly placed a bottle of vodka in her hands.
Category:CertainShadows
Category:Mental Illness