Page 21 of Lies in Promises
And that’s how our days went.
Marisela and I never stopped seeing each other after that. We continued exploring whatever was happening between us until we became an official couple.
It only made sense because in a short period of time, we became each other’s everything.
She was there when I got a call from Manuel that Henry had received the guardianship paperwork and everything with Bennett was squared away, and I was there when she called her father asking if she could stay in the states for a bit longer.
Turns out, her father is a political figure in Mexico, close to starting a bid for governor of Sinaloa. He wanted his daughter home as soon as possible to show the people he is a family man?—
Though in truth, he wasn’t.
But in the end, they were able to work out a deal, one that would let Marisela stay in Texas for a few months longer.
We may have been excited, but what we didn’t know was that within nine months of meeting, our world was going to change.
For the better or worse, we didn’t know at the time.
But the second Marisela took a pregnancy test and it came back positive, everything shifted—more so when Marisela said she wanted to keep the baby.
I had given up being a parent to my brother. How the hell was I going to be okay with being a parent to my own kid?
I battled with it for weeks; it even was something Marisela and I fought over on more than one occasion.
She had finished school by the time we found out about the pregnancy and was working odd jobs, so instead of stickingaround to deal with the fighting, she left me, going to live with an aunt in Arizona for a few weeks before heading back to Sinaloa to prepare for the birth.
Her leaving fucking broke me.
But it also lit a fire under my ass like nothing ever has before.
I was on the verge of losing the love of my fucking life, along with the possibility of never meeting my son. I needed to get my shit together.
What I wasn’t able to do in two years, I had to do in a few weeks’ time.
I doubted I ever was going to be in a place in which Marisela would come back to me, in which we could live as the family she wanted from the second she found out she was pregnant.
But I had to try.
For Marisela. For our son.
I didn’t try with Bennett. I gave him up.
I wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.
So I did the one thing I could think of.
Join the military.
Before meeting Marisela, I had been in talks with a few recruiters. I felt like I needed a fucking purpose. Maybe if I were a part of something so serious, I would get my shit together and go back to Chicago.
I wasn’t in the right headspace, though, so I didn’t go through with the sign-up on my eighteenth birthday. Now, with everything going on, it seemed like the right thing to do.
There was a lot of what ifs with enlisting, but as long as my family was taken care of, financially and otherwise, that was all that mattered. Part of me was tempted to go back to Chicago, but I couldn’t seem to pull the trigger.
That would have been the logical choice, the only choice, but it was a choice I couldn’t make.
I had to take care of my family on my own. If I wanted to get my shit together and make everything worth it, I needed to do it on my own.
Before I went to basic training, I let Marisela know. She hated me for it. She hated making the decision without her, one that affected our son, but it was done. All I was able to promise was that I was going to be back before the baby was born.
