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Alma’s steps are quiet and measured as she follows Bruno. It had been several hours since her botched first family meal. Perhaps one conversation hadn’t been enough to loosen her tight control over her family.
And by that, she means she failed.
Utterly and miserably.
Luisa fled the room, crying, and Isabela got so frustrated she tore her napkin in two without realizing. Antonio started the meal teary-eyed, so Mirabel and Camilo did their best to distract him, loudly. Dolores hadn’t said a word, and Pepa, Julieta, and Alma plied Bruno with food until he was quite literally and abruptly ill.
He’d, unsurprisingly, fled the room after and not even Mirabel could find him for the next hour.
If she’s honest, Alma didn't expect to see him again. If the holding pattern the two of them fell into ten long years ago was to resume.
She’d push Bruno, as she always had, and he’d fade into the shadows. He’d pad through the house in the silence of the early hours. Occasionally running into Julieta, but on the whole, avoiding everyone but the children.
Of course, the thought of him vanishing so soon after his return filled her with dread, and she enlisted her present hijos, their esposos, and Mirabel to aid in her search. Mirabel told her he’d be back, likely as soon as she stopped searching. She was a voice of reason, despite it being a role too heavy for a 15-year-old.
Mirabel was proven correct when Alma had heard her son’s near-silent footfalls slinking towards the church’s kitchen, just a few hours later. Perhaps the earlier nausea finally faded enough to let his nutrition-starved body demand food.
Alma slipped after him, careful not to startle him.
Julieta wasn’t idle after the search had been called off. She tied up her skirt and searched through the rubble of their home for her medical texts. Then, she spent the morning reading and sharing what she learned.
So Alma followed her youngest, her Brunito. And she poured him a glass of milk as he shrunk away from her, avoiding her gaze, just as Alma avoided looking at the faint scars on his too-thin wrists when he tightly clasped his left arm with his right.
It wasn’t much. Just a glass of milk, but her eldest assured her it was the first step to seeing her little boy healthy. Something he hadn’t been in a very long time.