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The front door slammed so hard that the walls shook. I had been playing guitar, trying to work something out. Now I looked up. "Adonis?" I called.
He stormed into the house but walked right past me without saying a word, his face dark with anger, his jacket flying, muttering something I couldn't quite catch.
"Baby?" I followed him into the bedroom, where I found him just sitting there, his hands balled into fists, tears streaming down his face. "Bubba, what is it? What's wrong?"
"We gotta move," he announced. "I don't wanna live here no more. We can't stay in this fucking house!"
"Why not?"
"It's Pops," Adonis said miserably. "We need our own space, Selena. We need to be on our own. Really on our own!"
I knew what he meant. We had been living in the house next door to Adonis's parents for almost a year, and we often felt like we were being watched. The entire Quiñones family was still living in the same modest Virginia Beach neighborhood; Abraham and Marcella in one house, Mercedes with her husband and kids in another; and Adonis and me in the third. Now it looked like Adonis had gotten into another argument with Abraham. Most likely it had been about the record label that he wanted to open.
Whenever Adonis tried to discuss his desire to get into the music production business, Abraham's standard response was to try to talk him out of it. "What do you want to do that for?" he'd say. "That's a crazy idea. You're making plenty of money and you don't have enough time as it is. Why don't you just sit back and enjoy life?"
I could see Abraham's point. It was true that the band was making considerably more money now than we ever had before. Adonis and I were very comfortable financially. I earned a good salary as a guitarist under the umbrella of The Delegation, and Adonis and his family were commanding more money than ever for live shows.
While some people accused Abraham of controlling Adonis and his money, that simply wasn't true. Whatever Adonis and the band earned, Abraham would first take care of the payroll. Then the family split whatever was left in four equal parts. They divided the money from the Coca-Cola sponsorship as well, with the family splitting the first three payments in a year three ways and Adonis and I keeping the fourth.
Opening a record label probably wouldn't add much to Adonis's income, at least not at first, and getting this kind of business up and running would be extremely time-consuming. On the other hand, living with Adonis had shown me firsthand that he was an incredibly hard worker, and I knew how much he wanted to do this. His family didn't fully grasp how badly Adonis needed to do something just for himself.
