To Selena, With Love (18 page)

Whenever Selena and I weren’t visiting friends and family, we loved staying home to cook, putter, and watch TV. We fully enjoyed experiencing what we’d never had before: an open, loving relationship that we could share with the world, even holding hands on the street if we felt like it. Our love felt fresh again because we no longer had to tiptoe around and hide how we felt about each other.

It seemed that, despite Abraham flinging every possible obstacle in our path, we might be able to live happily ever after, even without Selena’s fairy-tale wedding.

Courtesy of Carmen M. Cadena

“
T
hat winter was so cold in Lake Jackson that my baby pigs died,” Selena said. “But my mom brought them back to life.”

I laughed. “You’re not serious.”

Selena was telling me this story as we walked around a mall in San Antonio. We were headed for her favorite store—the pet store—and she was telling me about having a pet chicken and pet piglets as a little kid. I loved her stories, because I’d never had a pet as a child.

“She did, really!” Selena said. “The pigs were dead and I was crying, so my mom decided to bring the pigs into the kitchen. We turned the oven on low and laid the piglets out on the oven door.”

“That couldn’t possibly work,” I said, taking delight in my wife’s brown eyes, which were dancing at the memory of her mother’s heroics.

Selena grew solemn all of a sudden. “Those piggies warmed right up and walked again,” she promised, and then started giggling.

Selena was an animal lover, and so was I. Maybe that’s why, as soon as we had a house of our own, we started our practice family.
Or maybe it was just because Selena loved to buy things on impulse.

The house had been the subject of many late-night debates between us. Around the time Selena’s lease on her apartment was due to be renewed, Abraham announced that he was making an offer on a house in his neighborhood—a house on Bloomington Street with a yard that connected to his own. A.B. already lived next door to Abraham, on the other side; if we moved in, the entire Quintanilla family would live in three adjoining houses.

“Uh-uh. No way am I going to live next to my father,” Selena announced.

I had some doubts about living that close to Abraham, too, given his strong will and his temper. At the same time, I respected the man as both a manager and Selena’s father, and I didn’t usually feel like he could railroad me; we had developed a mutual respect, and occasionally Abraham called me “son.”

By now, I had a better understanding of the Quintanilla family’s dynamics. I knew how vitally important family was to them. Selena and her family members could really make each other angry to the nth degree, but eventually their disagreements usually blew over and things would be fine. They had worked hard to build their lives together. I didn’t want to just come in and say,
Okay, we’re married, now we’re going to get as far away as we can
. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t afraid of getting lost or railroaded if we lived next to Abraham. I had a strong sense of self even at that age.

Plus, there was a certain logic to us all living nearby, since we spent so many hours working together on music. Not only that, Abraham was generously going to buy the house himself and let Selena and me live in it rent-free.

“If we do this, we could save up for a house,” I pointed out to her. “And we see your family all the time on the road anyway. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that they’d be right next door,” Selena argued. “If we had friends come over or any kind of get-together, you know my dad is going to want to be there.”

“Well, we’d probably invite him anyway,” I said. “We usually do. Look, I’m cool with the idea. You know that I’m fine with being around your family. You decide. Either way is fine with me. We can always live in San Antonio if you want more distance.”

My family and friends were all in San Antonio, but Selena’s family was all in Corpus. In the end, she decided that it made sense to accept her father’s offer. “That way we can take our time and maybe even build a house we really like,” she said.

So, within three months of being married, Selena and I had our own house. After painting it, tearing up the carpets, and putting in new floors, Selena and I went to a furniture store in Corpus to buy a few things. That’s when she spotted a headboard that was also a huge aquarium and declared that she had to have it. It was Plexiglas, eighteen inches high, with a black border all around it.

“It’s completely art deco,” Selena said. “It’ll be perfect with our black carpet and black sofa.”

I was doubtful. “It doesn’t even have a filter,” I said. “I’d have to build a filtration system into it. And if you want a saltwater aquarium, well, that’s a lot of maintenance.”

“Come on, please?” Selena said. “It would look really cool in our bedroom.”

I couldn’t ever say no to her when Selena turned her big brown eyes on me and made that sad puppy face. I started buying books
on saltwater aquariums and figuring out how to build the filtration system. It was a lot of work, but eventually I managed to slit the aquarium in a way that allowed me to insert a PVC pipe into it and mount it to a pump. For a while we had a beautiful aquarium with no fish in it at all, because I had to keep adjusting the filter and making sure the water stayed clear and had the right levels of salt.

Meanwhile, Selena was poring through books on saltwater fish and exclaiming over their colors and shapes. They weren’t cheap fish, and I knew that keeping them healthy would be a big job. But we were both really excited when the day finally came that we could add fish. And the aquarium was, as Selena had predicted, the perfect addition to our bedroom, a moving work of art.

But why stop there? With Selena, more was often better. One day, I came home and she said, “Look what I bought!”

It was another aquarium. This one was octagonal and taller than I was. It had a black base about a foot tall, and another black piece with a clock set into it. Luckily, this aquarium came with all of the necessary filtration equipment, but I still had to put it together. It was worth it, though, because Selena loved those fish so much.

Now, as we walked to the pet store, Selena spotted a pen full of puppies outside the door. Immediately she ran over to it and put her fingers in, letting the dogs lick her and nip at her fingers. She was nearly bouncing up and down with delight, making me smile as I watched her.

They were cute puppies, to be sure: fuzzy, lively little Pomeranians tumbling all over each other in their nest of newspaper shavings. Most were tan and white. They were sweet looking, but Selena was captivated by the only black puppy in the litter. “Look at this
one!” she squealed. “Doesn’t she look just like a little bear? I really want her!”

What would we do with a dog while we were on the road? Still, I could never deny Selena anything. “Let’s check her out,” I suggested.

There was a room in the back where customers could sit and play with dogs they were considering buying. A store clerk led us back there and talked to us about the pros and cons of Pomeranians as pets, and the particulars about this puppy’s birth date and vaccinations. She might as well have been singing opera. Neither of us was listening. Selena was down on the floor, rolling around with the dog, and I knew the deal was done.

We acted like parents with a newborn, buying every possible accessory for that puppy. We named her Pebbles and took her on the road with us until she was old enough to stay home with our housekeeper whenever we were gone.

Pebbles became queen of our house. She also started our dog collection.

A few months after getting her, my friend Jesse came to Corpus to visit. He and I went shopping at another mall and happened to walk past a pet store. I glanced in the window and spotted four Siberian husky puppies. One of them had incredible markings on his face, including a black cross straight up and down his nose and across his eyes.

“That’s a cool-looking dog,” I said, reaching down to pat him.

“Why don’t you get him?” Jesse asked.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I wasn’t serious.

When I got home later, I started showing Selena the clothes I’d bought at the mall.

“Did you see anything else you liked there?” she asked.

“Hey, tell her about the dog,” Jesse said.

“Oh, yeah, we saw a cute husky puppy. Really cool looking,” I told her, and described the dog’s markings.

Right away, Selena said, “Let’s go see him. Can we go back there and see him?”

I laughed because she was so excited. “Another dog? Pebbles would kill us.”

“Come on,” she pleaded. “I really want to see that puppy. Let’s go back there and check him out.”

Oh, man, here we go, I thought, but I drove us all back to the pet store anyway. I gave Selena a little speech on the way there. “We’re just going to look at the puppies,” I reminded her. “We’ve already got Pebbles. Now don’t freak out and all of a sudden want to buy him. Don’t get carried away.”

“Okay,” she said. “I promise.”

As soon as we got to the pet store, though, Selena went crazy. “Which one is it? Is that him right there?”

She ran over to the cage and picked up the puppy with the black face markings, holding him close. “Oh my God, I love him. Let’s bring him home. Can we?”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“You all are going to get him for real?” Jesse asked, amazed by Selena’s excitement. He was laughing, too, because he’d started this whole thing.

“Of course we are,” Selena said, and off we went with our new dog. We named him “Jax” for my Jackson guitar.

Jax turned out to be a really cool dog. Everybody in the neighborhood was scared of him, though, because he had weird, bright blue eyes that almost looked like marbles and those black markings
on his face. Our house was near an elementary school, and I remember one time being out in the yard when this kid came along and started banging on the fence, trying to tease the dog. I could just see the kid’s face in the cracks between the fence slats, and his little hands up on top of it. I knew what he was going to do before he did it.

Jax knew, too. He sat and waited for the little boy to reach up, grab the top of the fence, and pull himself up to see over it. Then Jax jumped straight up and popped the boy in the forehead with his nose, so that the kid took off running.

Only Pebbles, our Pomeranian, told Jax what to do. She remained the queen despite the fact that Jax was three times her size. Whenever we let her out in the yard, Pebbles would run up to Jax and tug on his ears with her teeth. She was a rowdy little thing.

Our dog party didn’t stop there. One day, Selena was outside cutting the grass—she loved doing that—when a woman walked by with two gigantic beasts. When I came home from running errands, I turned the corner in the car and saw Selena standing there talking to the woman with these humongous dogs the size of ponies.

“What the hell are those?” I muttered.

The minute I parked in the driveway and got out of the car, Selena said, “Babe, come over here. Meet our neighbor Margie and her great dogs.”