Chapter 1 #2
I knew exactly what he was asking. With a heavy sigh, I gave him the response he expected. “I know where my duty lies, Papá, and I will never forget it.”
“You must never! The cártel will always want to undermine you because you are a woman. You cannot rise into power with a man at your side because the man is all they will see. You will be judged for his weaknesses as if they were your own, they will look past your legacy. I did not spend your whole life preparing you for this to let some man dictate how you are received. Especially some gringo. When the time comes, marriage will find you when the alliance is right mija, and this will open many more doors for us all.”
Hope died in my heart right then, “I know Papá, you tell me this often, I understand.”
“Good,” he cupped my cheek in his hand and kissed the top of my head. “Then I will eat with the boy who has stolen you from me,” he winked at me before breaking away with a laugh.
I spent the rest of the day anxiously waiting for dinner time and pestering my tía in the kitchen after she refused my mamá’s proposal that we let one of her chefs cook this.
My tía thought dinners like this were too important to be left to the help and that we needed a meal we could taste the love from.
I honestly wasn’t sure how that would work since I had never seen either one of those two in the kitchen before in the entire time I had been living here, but I wasn’t going to deny her an opportunity to do something that she considered to be a gesture of kindness.
“How old are you Ronan?” My papá asked without lifting his eyes from his plate, as if the food in front of him was far more important than this conversation could ever be.
“I just turned seventeen, sir.” A fire in his eyes as he lifted his chin up bravely.
“Almost a man then. So, you will be a senior next year, yes? Hopefully moving on to a good school after that. What are your interests?” My papá interrogated him, finally shifting his eyes toward his prey.
“I’ll be trying to stay as close to home as possible so I can stay near Cecilia, she is really my only interest, so maybe if I get lucky, UCLA will take me.
I don’t know what I plan on doing there yet though.
” He scratched the back of his head nervously and looked down at his plate, then back at me for comfort.
I squeezed his free hand from my place next to him and smiled at him to assure him that he was doing okay.
My papá lifted his eyebrow, my gut churning at the reaction and my grip on Ronan’s hand loosening. The correct answer was the one that got him as far away from me as possible, by his own choice.
Papá sucked some imaginary food from his teeth and said in his thick accent, “I will entertain this little romance the two of you have fostered, for now. But there will be a time when my daughter will break your heart because duty binds her to do so. You will not cry, you will not pout, you will not moan. You will not come groveling at this door, you will simply accept this like a man and move on. Do you understand me?”
No sounds of silverware clinking could be heard anymore. My tía and mamá went silent, making eyes at each other from across the table. Ronan’s eyes burned through me, my heart physically breaking at that very moment, though I couldn’t meet his gaze for reassurance if my life depended on it.
His voice was quiet. “Sir, why?”
“Simply because you are not good enough for my daughter. No single man on this earth ever will be. More importantly though, because she has shoes to fill, and her destiny unlike yours is already mapped out ahead of her. I would not make plans for the future if I was you, son. I would do what is best for you, and only you so that when the time comes you can move on with your life instead of hopelessly questioning why this happened or why no one ever warned you. You are being warned now. You are not destined for my daughter. But I will allow you to keep company with her until the time comes where she is needed where she belongs, in México.” He dropped his napkin on the plate.
All four women at the table stood as he rose from his chair taking their places seated once again after he cleared from the room.
“Well, that could have been much worse, if you ask me.” Tía Larissa nervously chirped, and my mamá clicked her tongue to signal my tía in one of their psychic communication moments.
They both got up together and walked toward the pool house.
“Let’s go,” Mamá called back when she noticed Caro still seated across from me.
She looked between us with so many questions in her eyes that I couldn’t begin to answer.
I knew she was hurting for Ronan. He’d been like a big brother to her and the idea that we wouldn’t be together wasn’t something she probably had ever fathomed.
Still, she stood and followed mamá out the door, and it was only when the click of it shutting signaled their exit that Ronan spoke again.
“Are you gonna look at me?” Ronan’s voice was already a deep bravado, though I swore it was only a summer or two ago that I teased him for how it cracked.
I couldn’t seem to lift my head up to meet his gaze, the weight of my guilt too heavy to hold. Pulling back the tears that fought to escape, I faked a smile, “They’re right you know? That’s about as well as it could have gone,” I managed to say.
“This is bullshit Cecilia. What is he talking about? Why is he putting an expiration date on us? What aren’t you telling me?” Ronan forced my chin up to look at him with his fingers.
“I can’t tell you more than what you’ve been told.
My papá does important work, and when I get older, he wants me to take over…
it.” I fumbled awkwardly through the sentence.
“There are certain expectations of me when I am to take power, and one of those expectations is to use my relationship status as a way to secure the interests of… the company.” I said as quietly as possible, almost hoping he couldn’t hear me.
“What the Fuck are you talking about? What are any of you talking about? It sounds like your father is selling you to the highest bidder, so please explain to me Cecilia.” He slammed his fist on the table, the tableware clattering from the force of his rage.
“That’s not what’s happening,” I shook my head looking down, unable to believe that he’d think something like that.
He was so angry, but how could I blame him?
For almost eight years I’d been wrapping myself around him and entangling into every part of his life just so he could be told one day he’d have to watch me walk away.
I wasn’t guiltless, I did know better, but selfishly wanted to have him anyway. I wanted to keep this charade of normalcy to myself and pretend like one day we’d be the high-school sweethearts who would get married. But he was right, we had an expiration date.
“I think I need to go; I need to clear my head… or something,” he said, each word becoming harder to make out as he mumbled through them defeated.
Squeezing his hand until I couldn’t feel my own anymore, I whispered, “Please don’t leave me,”
“I could never leave you Cecilia, but I need to go home and sit with the fact that you will someday,” he unwrapped his fingers from my hand, leaving my heart shattered in my chest.
I squeezed my hands until my fingernails drew blood in my palms like I learned to when I was little, and instead of dropping a tear I grew another shell of ice over my heart.
My papá’s visit came and went almost as quickly as ever this time. The difference was the feeling of finality that came with the promise of my tío’s head. Once he was eliminated, we were free to live our lives the way we always were meant to.
Maybe I could be Celia Flores again, even though I wasn’t actually quite sure who she was anymore anyway.
Ronan was still brushing off the mess that had been the dinner he so eagerly asked for.
My papá wasn’t a kind man when it came to his daughters, and he made it well known to anyone who wanted to divert me from the path he had chosen – even Mamá. But Papá had set off a ticking time bomb into my relationship and expected Ronan to act like a man about it.
The truth was, he had broken my heart too that night, but as his daughter, I was expected to understand that it was all for my good.
Ronan questioned years before why my papá always came with multiple cars and a plethora of armed men at his side, or why we holed ourselves inside of my tía’s fortress until he was gone.
It was pretty easy to dismiss it all as government work and that my papá was high up in the chain as well, and it hadn’t been a complete lie.
He was the chain.
There was a fine line between gang life and government life and when it was all you grew up knowing that fine line faded quite easily. The number of times my papá had lunch with the president of México every year was more annoying than I could count. My papá definitely made more money than him too.
Cézar was packing up the cars and loading my papá’s belongings into the Mercedes Benz the two of them would be taking on their trip back. The rest of his men loaded their bags and weapons into the obscenity that was the armored Land Rover.
Cézar headed back into the house for the rest of the bags as we began to say our goodbyes to Papá, this time it could be a few months until we would meet again. He was so sure he was too close to catch Ignacio and couldn’t risk anything bringing him back to us and compromising our safety again.
Tía Larissa stood at the top of the driveway as mamá, Carolina, and I created a perfect queue on papá’s side of the car to say our farewells.
Mamá was already dramatically crying that she couldn’t keep doing this even though at this point it was all we knew.
As cold as she was to me, my heart still hurt for her.