To Selena, With Love (13 page)

“Man,” he said now, clenching his fists a little. “Why did Abraham have to push you like that? What did he think was going to happen?”

“It’s okay, Dad,” I reassured him. “It’s a good thing. Everything is cool.”

A sudden movement in the doorway made me glance in that direction. Selena was standing there now, looking in, her brown eyes so huge that it was almost comical.

My father turned around and slowly got to his feet when he saw Selena. Then he took a couple of steps toward her, and Selena rushed into his arms, where he folded her into a great hug.

We sat and talked with my father for a while, and then we drove over to my mom’s. I’m not sure what possessed Selena and me to go there, of all places, for our wedding night. I guess we were both feeling pretty shaky and just needed to be someplace where we knew we would be accepted as who we were: newlyweds who had just promised to love, honor, and cherish one another for a lifetime. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

At any rate, we drove to my mother’s house and told her and Pops the news. Again, I had trouble getting the words out.

“Mom, we did it,” I said.

“What did you do?” she asked, looking from Selena to me.

“You know, Mom. The ‘M’ word.”

As close as she was to my mother, Selena must have been really nervous here, too, for she suddenly announced, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and fled.

My mother and stepfather reacted to our news much the same way my dad had. They knew how in love we were, and they were happy to hear that we were married. But they both thought it was a shame that Selena and I had been driven to marry so young, and in secret.

Finally, in bed that night, Selena and I talked about what might happen next. We agreed to live in Selena’s apartment in Corpus—a place that she had been using as a studio of sorts for her fashion design hobby—as long as her father didn’t harass us once we started living there.

“You’re coming back to the band,” Selena said. She was asking me and telling me at the same time.

“No,” I told her. “No way. After everything I’ve been through with your father and Los Dinos, I have no desire to deal with that stuff.”

She sat up in bed next to me. “What are you talking about? It’s not going to be like that.”

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. “Neither of us knows what Abraham will do.”

She didn’t like hearing that. But it was true. I wasn’t about to drop what I was doing to run back to the band. I was pretty convinced that I’d be better off on my own than with Los Dinos.

Suddenly, my mother’s house phone rang. It was A.B. The family had been trying to track down Selena all day, he said, and they knew about our marriage.

Today, of course, people would have been tweeting or texting or blogging about it before she and I even made it out of the courthouse. Even without all that, news of our marriage had spread within the hour. The clerks at City Hall had probably told their friends, “Hey, guess who got a marriage license today?” This gossip had led people in the music business to catch wind of it. DJs started phoning Abraham’s house to see if the news was true. A few radio stations even announced the news.

Selena’s face paled when she first started talking to her brother and discovered that everyone in her family knew about our marriage by now. Then, all of a sudden, her brother said something that made her laugh. That was a good sign, I thought, feeling my stomach unclench a little.

Suddenly, Selena thrust the phone in my direction. “A.B. wants to talk to you,” she said.

My first reaction was to say no. But Selena gave me this look, and I knew I didn’t have any choice.

A.B. has a quality that he shared with Selena, an ability to
disarm you within seconds of starting up a conversation, no matter how set you might be against him. He did that with me now.

As soon as I got on the phone, A.B. said, “Welcome to the family, bro,” and then he was laughing and I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, too, because the whole situation seemed so surreal. Plus, A.B. and I had started out as friends long before I became involved with his little sister. As tough as I wanted to be with him, as much as I wanted to hang on to my anger because everyone in the band had turned their backs on me, when I heard A.B say those words, my anger just melted away. Gone.

We talked a little more, and A.B. did apologize at last. “Man, I’m sorry things went the way they did,” he said. “But it’s all right now. Y’all are married, and it’s for the best. You’re coming on the road with us, right?”

The question caught me off guard. “Well,” I said, trying to think past the shocks that just kept coming. “Do you all want me to come back?”

“Of course,” he said. “Who else can play guitar like you can?”

“Is your dad cool with that?” I asked.

“He’s going to have to accept it,” A.B. said. “He’s a little upset right now. He’s not taking the news very well, but he’ll get used to the idea.”

Of course that wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear. But what else had I expected? “All right,” I said. “If you say it’s cool, then I’ll come back.”

“I do. Tell my sister that I love her and I’ll see you guys soon,” A.B. said. “Welcome to the family, brother-in-law.”

We both started laughing again, and then I hung up. Selena had been listening to all of this, of course. If she had been happy before,
now she was ecstatic. Everything was falling into place just as she had hoped.

We fell back into bed and wrapped our arms around each other, still amazed at our good fortune: We had found each other and our love had proved stronger than any obstacles thrown our way.

Courtesy of the author

T
he next day, Selena and I moved into her apartment in Corpus and started our honeymoon. Her father showed up at our door hours after we’d arrived.

Abraham’s expression was unreadable. I felt my hands go cold and my heart started pounding. I was determined to be civil—this was Selena’s father, after all—but I wasn’t about to invite him inside. How could I trust this man, who had done nothing but hurl insults at me since finding out that I loved his daughter?

The worst-scase scenario, as I saw it, was that Abraham would accept me, without really accepting me, if you know what I mean. Maybe he would invite me into the band again to keep Selena happy, but there was a good possibility that he might act like I was family when Selena was around, but otherwise make it clear that he was still displeased—clear enough that the other band members might continue giving me the cold shoulder. I was therefore polite when Abraham arrived, but reserved; I no longer trusted the man any more than he trusted me.

Selena stayed inside the apartment while Abraham and I talked outside. I never thought to ask her later if she’d known Abraham
was coming over. He did that often after we were married—just dropped by unannounced—so she may have had no idea that Abraham was on his way.

I had been expecting the worst, so I was surprised when Abraham held things together. He didn’t say anything derogatory. In fact, he even began with an apology. If he’d been wearing a hat, he might have even taken it off and twisted it in his hands.

“I shouldn’t have been the way that I was,” he said. “I hope you know that I was only protecting Selena.”

I told him that I did know that, but I was still offended and hurt. “When we were on the road together, I spent more time with you and your family than I did with my own family,” I pointed out. “You should know me by now. I would never do anything to hurt Selena. I love her.”

He nodded, accepting this, it seemed. Then Abraham became businesslike—the mode he was most comfortable in, I knew. “Are you coming back to the band?” he asked.

I could have taken a stance and resisted—not just to be contrary, but because I truly was happy playing around San Antonio with Rudy and Albert, and working as an independent musician. Did I really want all of the baggage that would come with rejoining Los Dinos and the Quintanilla family?

Again, though, I tried to see things from Abraham’s point of view. He must have been humiliated and angry when he heard that Selena and I had gotten married behind his back. Because he had no idea of the true nature of our relationship, and didn’t even know how long we had been seeing each other, it must have been a total shock when strangers telephoned to tell him that his beloved youngest daughter, who in his eyes had the potential to be a superstar, had
gone against his wishes and married a long-haired guitarist whom he didn’t deem worthy.

I decided that if Selena’s father could behave so professionally with all of his emotions surely swirling around inside him, I could, too. Plus I knew how happy Selena would be if I rejoined Los Dinos. “I’ll come back if you want me to,” I said. “It’s up to you and A.B.”

“Selena wants you in the group,” Abraham said gruffly, and then he actually gave me a hug. He was shaking a little with emotion.

Feeling the tremor in his body, I realized, once again, how devastated Abraham must have been when he discovered that Selena had gone against his wishes, and how much it had cost him to come over here and accept me into the family. Selena was his baby girl, and I know that man loved her more than his own life. But Abraham had apologized and he was trying to make it possible for us to have a relationship both within the family and in the band. I respected him for that.

We went into the apartment together then. Selena and Abraham hugged each other for a long time. She started crying, and then Abraham did, too.

“I’m sorry I pushed you kids into a corner,” Abraham said at last. “Let’s just continue from here. We’ll go on doing what we were doing as a band, and we’ll move forward over this bump in the road.”

So we embraced, said our apologies, and agreed to move on. It was a good thing we did, too, because things were ready to explode on the music scene for Selena y Los Dinos.

To celebrate our love, I decided to pay a special tribute to Selena with my favorite guitar. The guitar was a white Jackson Soloist. It
was the first electric guitar I had ever bought that was considered top-of-the-line, and it did everything I needed it to do. Even when I upgraded to a Fender Stratocaster, I kept the Jackson with me as a backup guitar onstage and still played it now and then.