Let's Not Meet~ Reddit

Scary Mary

By sheikysheik

To start out, this story sort of takes place on and off again throughout most of my life. It starts out as a typical “my parents got a divorce when I was young” situation, but it unfolded into so much more. In fact I’m still picking up pieces of everything that happened. Just a warning, this is a super long story. I don’t blame you if you lose interest halfway in… there’s a lot of backstory that I feel is important to understanding what happened.

As it stands now, my father is dead. It was ruled a suicide, but I think that was only half of what happened. I’ll talk about everything that lead up to this, but more importantly, I believe that Mary definitely had a hand in what happened.

My mother and father divorced when I was around 4. Almost everyone I know has gone through some sort of similar situation. I have two brothers, one older and one younger. We saw him about every other weekend, he paid child support… you get the gist. One weekend visit, my father introduces us to a woman he’s seeing, named Mary. Her eyes and hair are dark, and her skin is pale. She had an obsession with the color red. Something was immediately off to me, but I didn’t really start to know what she was capable of until later.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Mary is one of the main reasons my parents got divorced. My father cheated on my mother with her. He met her while he was working as a waiter at a Red Lobster. When he moved over to his career at a casino as a slot-machine repairman, she followed. Mary would follow my dad anywhere. They got married pretty quickly after my mother and father divorced. I never even knew there was a wedding until later.

My mother hated her, but she never bad-mouthed my father or Mary in front of my brothers and I. She felt that it was important for us to make judgments for ourselves, even if this woman was part of the reason her marriage was broken up. We continued to visit what was now “Dad and Mary’s house” on our scheduled time with Dad. I always associated their house with red--Their house was always decorated with strawberries, Mary liked red sheets, she had red sweaters and pants… It was weird.

Mary was just unnecessary drama for awhile. Things like buying us toys that we could only keep at Dad and Mary’s house or saying that she and my father wanted to custody of us instead of my Mom… I feel like these things were harmless in a way. Every divorcing couple probably has some sort of variation.

Things carried on like this for a couple of years. We would have a special variation of Christmas or Easter or whatever aside from what we celebrated with my mom. I was about 7 or 8 when I remember the first incident that confirmed that I knew this wasn’t right. My little brother was a super curious child, and he was about 4. He had scooted a dining table chair to the fridge to get to a cereal box on top, and when he reached up, he pulled down a handgun instead of the cereal box. I panicked and got my dad, who acted really funny about it. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember going home early that weekend. My dad didn’t know the gun was there because it was Mary’s.

It was at this point that my mom started to have trouble with us going over there. My father got worse about being able to come pick us up. He was unreliable for the most part to begin with, but I know that he was ten times worse when he was around Mary.

My mom told me later, when I was much older, that Mary called our house around the time of the gun incident and said, “I want your life.”

My mother is a really tough lady. She grew up in East LA in California. This scared her. She was going to get a restraining order soon.

I guess what Mary meant was that she wanted my mom’s stability. Even as a single mom with three kids, she was doing very well for herself, and even dating. But even so, how long had she obsessed with my mom before she and my father ever got divorced? What did that even mean?