The Walmart Bathing Suit Suicide
Now that my father had made his grand public declaration—that my brother’s wife was no longer welcome, that he and his robotic wife were done with grandparenting, and that they wanted nothing to do with the kids—it all seemed inevitable. The message was clear: “Don’t ask us for shit. Go fuck yourself.” And that pretty much unraveled whatever thin connection my brother thought he had left with them.
The irony, of course, was that my brother and his wife had spent the last few years bouncing from state to state, chasing a “family connection.” They moved to Denver for it. Didn’t happen. Moved to Bend, Oregon for it. Didn’t happen. Moved back to Colorado for it. Didn’t happen. Now, the last bridge was burned, and my father, ever the tactful war general, had given his decree with all the warmth of a winter corpse.
And so, in classic tragic fashion, my brother’s wife packed up the kids and drove to Alabama to be with her family. Maybe it was meant to be a visit, maybe a break, but days stretched into weeks, then months. My brother, working at a pawn shop making the highest hourly wage of his life, finally had to confront what was happening. She wasn’t coming back.
He drove down to Alabama to “fix” things, only to find that things had already been decided for him. She had a house now. A real one. No trailer park, no shitty apartment, no condo that smelled like mildew. A real house with clean floors and new paint. And a new family.
Her message was simple: “This is where the love is. Not in Colorado. Not with your family. Here. With me.”
Of course, my brother, ever the devoted mother, was in full denial. “But my career at the pawn shop! But my father’s unconditional financial guilt! But my sense of loyalty to a family that never really liked me anyway!”
None of it mattered.
The decision had been made for him. She had moved on. And, in case he needed any further clarification, a new man—stockier than him, same hair, same goatee—started appearing in family photos. The kids called him Dad. She kissed him in pictures. She posted them on Facebook, ensuring my brother could watch every single humiliating second of his replacement in real time, like some cuckolded voyeur in a bad porno.
Yes, he cried. Yes, he begged. But my brother was never quite man enough to take control of anything in his life, and this wasn’t going to be any different.
With his pawn shop career unable to fix a broken marriage, he turned to my father for help. The old man, who had never given a single shit about emotional support, felt guilty enough to wire some money for a last-ditch effort. My brother loaded up whatever he had left (probably all financed by my father), hopped on his broken-down motorcycle, and rode down to Alabama with the weight of a man who knew he was walking straight into an execution.
And, sure enough, it was a disaster.
The kids loved their new dad. The wife was sexually satisfied, which—let’s be honest—hadn’t happened in their marriage for a while. And my brother? He was a ghost. A mistake that had been corrected.
When the money ran out, he had no choice. Her parents, seeing the whole miserable train wreck, took pity on him. They let him stay. And so, he lived with his in-laws like a rejected orphan, trying to figure out what the fuck he was supposed to do now that his entire existence had been erased and rewritten.
But there was still her.
And she wasn’t happy.
The boyfriend was losing interest. The sex wasn’t new anymore, and even cheap beer-fueled small-town passion has an expiration date. The kids still needed a father, and he was becoming a nuisance. Meanwhile, my brother was still lingering, still there, refusing to let go, refusing to admit he had lost.
Then came the family reunion.
A classic southern affair. Big barbecues. Crawfish boils. Cheap Bud Lights crushed under cowboy boots. A beach full of fat women in Walmart bikinis, proudly displaying their stretch marks as if they were war scars.
And there she sat.
On a plastic chair. Staring out at the Gulf of Mexico.
A dead body of a sea, poisoned and abandoned like her life.
Family members talked to her, tried to engage, but she wasn’t listening. She was somewhere else, lost in her own unraveling mind. She could feel it—everyone was against her. She was a bad mother. A manipulator. A liar. A leech. They were all whispering, all judging.
She didn’t move when the sun set.
Didn’t flinch when the laughter got louder.
Then she stood.
Straightened her back.
Adjusted her cheap Walmart swimsuit.
And walked into the water.
At first, no one reacted. Just another dramatic walk into the ocean, another scene for attention.
Then they saw it.
The glint of something metallic in her hand.
She raised it.
The silhouette of her body against the darkening sky, arm extended, gun pressed to her temple.
They froze.
The laughter stopped.
Then—
BANG.
She went limp.
The water swallowed her, pulling her under as her body floated for a moment before vanishing.
And that was that.
I got the call from my father. The same father who had created this entire fucking mess, now crying into the phone like he had actually given a shit about her. The same man who abandoned my mother, who never saw what he did to me, now suddenly devastated that another woman had done what I had once tried to do—except she had followed through.
I listened.
I let him cry.
And then, I told him what no one else would.
“She finally got her point across. You’re finally listening. Welcome to the fucking family.”
