She laughed. “Now that I know what a real secret is, I realize I’ve never had one in my life.”

  “You’ve had one,” said Laban.

  “What?”

  “That stupid veil. You’re not going to wear it anymore, are you?”

  “Why should I stop?”

  “Because, bonehead, Mother’s face is going to be on display everywhere, and since you look just like her—”

  “She’s much prettier.”

  “Since you look exactly like her, there’s really no point in hiding.”

  She gave in with a sigh. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. I’m always right.”

  “Ah, there’s the Laban I know and love.”

  “It’s the Laban I know and love, too,” said Laban.

  “The next few years are going to be interesting,” said Rebekah. “Having a mother and all. I’m looking forward to it, aren’t you?”

  “Not as much as I was looking forward to having Ezbaal as a brother-in-law.”

  “I’ll try to find you another just as good.”

  Laban’s tone turned serious. “I really am looking forward to it. You know the real reason I’m afraid to come out of the tent?”

  “Because you’re afraid Mother won’t like you when she gets to know you.”

  “Yes.” Then he apparently realized he didn’t want to admit that. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Yes it is,” said Rebekah. “And I can promise you—she’ll make allowances for the fact that you’re a boy and stupid, and she’ll like you fine, just as Father and I do.”

  “You always know how to buck a fellow up, Rebekah.”

  “I spread sunshine wherever I go.”

  “Then why is this tent so dark?”

  Rebekah didn’t answer, except with a hug and a kiss on his cheek. Then she stood up. “Is it all right if I go out through the door?”

  “I insist on it.”

  “I love you, Laban. Always and forever.”

  “Always and forever. Whatever you need from me, even when we’re both old and feeble, I’ll make sure you have it. That’s a solemn vow.”

  “I’ll take you up on it,” she said.

  Then she returned to her own tent, eager to sleep and get this awful day behind her. And yet, awful as it had been, angry as she still was about having been cheated out of years that could never be restored, she realized she was also eager to wake up in the morning and begin her new life, not as a wife, but as a daughter to this woman that God had finally restored to her, even though Mother did not believe in him. For if God’s hand wasn’t in it, how could all these things have come together as they did?

  Part III

  Chosen

  Chapter 7

  Never in Rebekah’s lifetime had the camp of Bethuel been happier than in the days and months after Mother’s return. Everyone seemed to sing when they weren’t talking, and the talk was filled with laughter; yet everyone worked as hard as ever, and with the year’s good rains there was plenty of pasturage and so they prospered.

  Was it this way, everyone so constantly cheerful, before Mother was exiled? Rebekah suspected not—back then, there would have been tension, with Mother sneaking around to worship Asherah and Father laying down the law. No doubt some of the servants back then had disliked her for disobeying Father, while others probably resented Father for trying to keep Mother from worshiping the god she loved best.

  Now, though, the euphoria reminded Rebekah of the time she found a lost doll. It was a foolish, poor thing, a toy made for her by Deborah with little care for workmanship, and played with by Rebekah when she was a toddler with no sense of just how much torture the cloth and seams of the doll could withstand. In time she had wearied of it, set it aside, and forgotten it.

  Then, when she was about ten years old, she happened to be rummaging through a pile of guest-rugs in search of one suitable for a noteworthy visitor, and what should she find between two rugs near the bottom of the stack? Her old doll, mashed flat by the weight of the rugs, still threadbare and seam-tattered.

  Rebekah had no use for dolls by then, being much too busy with the real life of the camp, and she had stopped caring about this one long ago, or it would never have been lost. Yet in the moment of finding it, it became a treasure. She pulled it out and ran to show Deborah and then Father, rejoicing. She put the doll in a place of honor in her tent, where it remained even today, the emblem of her childhood.

  Mother’s return was something like that, Rebekah believed. She had become the lost treasure, found again. And, like the doll, her mere presence was cause for everyone to celebrate. It was not Mother herself, but the finding of her, the restoration of what was lost.

  Oddly, though, Rebekah had no such feelings. Mother, after all, had not been hers the way the doll was. She had no memories of old times with her, no sense of recovering what she once had.

  Instead, Mother was the woman she had first known as Akyas, the enigmatic stranger who fascinated her and yet frightened her, just a little, if she was honest with herself. Mother remained a mystery even now. She had once shattered her marriage and lost her children because of her devotion to Asherah, but now she never gave any outward sign of being anything but completely content with Father and Father’s God. Rebekah knew she had arrived with a small statue of Asherah and assumed that she still had it. But perhaps not. Perhaps that night before the wedding, when Rebekah came upon her praying to Asherah, she had been bidding the god farewell. Perhaps the statue went home with Ezbaal’s women.

  Or perhaps not. Was it possible that she kept it in the very tent where Father came to her in the night? And if she did, how did Father feel about it? If he knew of any god-statue—other than the two that he used to represent God and his Servant-Son during solemn occasions—he gave no sign of it. There was no outward conflict at all. Mother and Father got along perfectly.

  Rebekah was not about to jeopardize that by asking any questions about what Father knew or didn’t know, or about what Mother did or didn’t do.

  The first days after the wedding were busy. While most of the adult women remembered Mother, she did not remember them as perfectly, certainly not the names. After all, she had lived in another household all these years, and could not possibly have remembered the names of fifty women she never expected to see again. Yet it couldn’t help but hurt those she did not remember. So Rebekah stayed near her throughout the first few days, ostensibly reporting to her on all the work that was being done, but actually reminding her of the women’s names and telling her of marriages, of children born, of deaths, of children grown up and gone.

  Then there was the matter of teaching her how to read and write. What children learned quickly came harder to adults; Rebekah already knew that. But Mother had a hard time paying attention. Much as she needed to know how to talk to her husband, she kept getting distracted during lessons, and for the first few days refused to endure the drilling and testing that Rebekah had put the servants through when she taught them years before.

  Perhaps if Rebekah had been in awe of her, as giddy as the other women were whenever Mother was with them, she could never have solved the problem. But Rebekah was not in awe. In fact, she was more than a little disappointed that Mother wasn’t . . . well, wasn’t serious about learning.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Rebekah said. “Since you aren’t interested in memorizing the letters, I’ll assign one of the servant women who can read and write to stay with you whenever you’re with Father.”

  “What?” said Mother. “What are you saying? I have to learn this!”

  “Yes, you do,” said Rebekah. “But this isn’t something you can assign to a servant to learn for you. You have to do the work yourself, and actually learn it by paying very close attention and practicing it over and over.”

  Mother was quite taken aback. “Did I come here to have my daughter speak to me like this?”

  Rebekah was annoyed that Mother so instantly appealed to a relationship that in fact they didn’t have. “Did you come here to waste my time with lessons you don’t care enough to pay attention to?”

  “What is it? Why are you angry at me?” asked Mother. “Is it because I’ve taken your place among the women? I hope you don’t think I’m going to supervise every detail of what they cook and how they weed the garden and . . . I think if they’re well trained they can do all those things themselves.”

  What did this have to do with the matter at hand, Rebekah wondered. “Mother,” she said, “I’m perfectly happy to have you supervise whatever you want to, or not supervise whatever you don’t want to. In fact, I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about learning to read and write so you can talk to Father.”

  “There you go again, getting that impatient tone with me, as if I were a servant. I’m not, you know.”

  The last thing Rebekah wanted to do was fight. “Apparently I can’t talk to you about this without offending you,” said Rebekah. “There are the letters, all written in the dirt. As long as you don’t sweep that patch, you can keep referring to them until you know them. Good luck.” She got up and headed out of Mother’s tent.

  “It’s very rude to walk out of your mother’s presence without her permission,” said Mother.

  “It’s also rude,” said Rebekah, standing at the doorway of the tent, “to ask me to teach you a skill that I have and you don’t, and then pay no attention and make no effort to learn it.”

  “I am making an effort,” said Mother. “Just because I’m not learning it as quickly as you’d like doesn’t mean you should just give up.”

  “All right, then,” said Rebekah. “What’s the sound of the first letter in the list?”

  Mother looked down at the letters in the dirt. “How should I know which one is first?”

  “It begins on the right side of the top row.”

  “I don’t know what sound it makes.”

  “But I’ve told you.”

  “But it takes time.”

  “No, Mother. It doesn’t take time, it takes practice, and every time I try to get you to practice you start talking about something else and the lesson stops. At this rate, you will learn to read sometime after I bring my own grandchildren to come visit their ancient great-grandmother.”

  Mother looked at her in consternation and then laughed. “Do you talk like this with everyone?”

  “No,” said Rebekah. “In fact, I don’t talk like this with anyone. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I get so impatient.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “No, that wasn’t true. I understand exactly why I get so impatient. I’m trying to do what you asked me to do, and you won’t let me do it.”

  “And I’m trying to use this time alone with you to get to know you, to chat with you, and you insist on repeating these same things over and over again. Ah ah ah ah ah. Buh buh buh buh buh. Duh duh duh duh duh.”

  Mother’s mockery of the letter-sounds was too funny, and Rebekah burst out laughing. Mother laughed, too.

  “Sit down,” Mother said. “I’m going to be here a long time. I’m not going to be able to memorize this whole list the first day. It’s you I want to memorize. You that I want to get to know.”

  Rebekah sighed and sat down. “But don’t you see, Mother? This is who I am. I’m the person who gets the job done. I plan it out, I work hard, and I don’t let anything distract me until I’ve accomplished it. So in your effort to find out who I am, you are not letting me be who I am.”

  “You don’t sit and gossip with the women?”

  “They’re women, Mother. I’m a girl. I’m also the master’s daughter. So they don’t sit and chat with me. They either consult me respectfully about the work, or if they feel at ease with me, they tease me like a girl. Or give me lectures about things I’ll need to know.”

  “But that is gossip.”

  “Mother, you came into this camp as a bride. I came into it as a baby. They’ll always see me as a baby. They’ll always see you as a woman.”

  “In other words, you don’t even know how to chat with me.”

  “I didn’t know that’s what you were doing. I thought you were bored with the lessons.”

  “And I thought you were lecturing me like a particularly stupid servant, making me do something over and over until I finally do it to your satisfaction.”

  “Except for the ‘particularly stupid’ part, yes, that’s exactly what I was doing.”

  “Then let’s teach each other,” said Mother. “You teach me how to turn these scratches in the dirt into words, and I’ll teach you how to gossip. I’ll tell you all about my life in the past fifteen years, and you tell me all about yours, until by the end of a few months we actually know each other, like good friends.”

  “I can’t believe I spoke to you the way I did,” said Rebekah.

  “You’re not used to having another woman in the camp who isn’t trying to fit in with your plans.”

  “I’m not really bossy,” said Rebekah.

  “No, but since all the women you’ve had dealings with have to obey you, even if they also love you, you’ve never learned how to talk to an equal.”

  “I don’t think you want me to talk to you the way I talk to Laban.”

  “I think I’d rather have that than your lecturing tone or your impatient tone or your ‘I’m going to go do something useful until you’re ready to do things my way’ tone.”

  This stung. Was that all that she saw in Rebekah? If I’m bossy, Mother, it’s because I had to take charge of things here. If I’m not skilled at being a grownup lady, it’s because I had no one but servants to learn from.

  Or was that just an excuse? Maybe she’s right, and this is who I really am.

  “My dear sweet daughter,” said Mother, “I can see that you’re offended and I didn’t mean to. I admire your strength. You’ve had responsibilities at your age that I never had—for one thing, Bethuel’s mother was still alive and inclined to run things until shortly before you were born. So even as a wife I didn’t do as much as you do. You’re strong and you’re smart and even when you’re lecturing me, you’re clever about it and funny and—I do love you and I’m not disappointed in you. I just wish you weren’t disappointed in me.”

  “I’m not!” cried Rebekah, feeling all the more upset because she knew that Mother had hit right on the peg: Rebekah was, in fact, disappointed.

  “Don’t fib to your mother,” said Mother.

  “I’m not fibbing,” said Rebekah. “And anyway, you haven’t known me long enough to tell when I’m lying and when I’m not.”

  “On the contrary,” said Mother, “you get the same faraway look in your eyes that I always get when I’m covering something up. It’s a dead giveaway. You look too much like me, child. You have too many of my mannerisms.”

  “I’m not disappointed in you,” said Rebekah, trying to be truthful. “I didn’t expect you, so how can I be disappointed? I just don’t know how to be a daughter, so I suppose I’m disappointed in me.”

  “Then let’s just be patient with each other’s way of doing things. I’m not as methodical as you are. You’re not as chatty as I am. So I’ll try to be a little more hard-working, and you try to make room for a few of my digressions.”

  And that’s what they did, clumsily at first but gradually with more skill as time went on. It was the first time in Rebekah’s life that she had to get used to somebody new, and it occurred to her that when she married somebody and went away, she’d have to go through this whole process, and not just with one woman, but with a whole household, not to mention a husband and all his kin.

  If I can’t learn to get along well with my own long-lost mother, I have no hope of getting along with a mother-in-law.

  Over the days and weeks they did get along better and better, until everything between them became quite smooth. Mother did learn to read and write, and not all that slowly. And she and Rebekah did tell each other all kinds of stories. Rebekah learned to listen to Mother’s stories the way Mother listened to hers—constantly thinking of some experience or story of her own to come back with. And now that she thought about it, this was the way other women gossiped, trading stories—and sometimes competing with them. Oh, you think that story of a miserable childbirth is bad? Well, let me tell you the awful things that happened to me. Rebekah had never been part of such conversations and so she didn’t understand the skill it took to come up with a story that seemed appropriate to the conversation. But with Mother it was an art, and Rebekah at first admired, then envied, and finally emulated her.

  As a result, Rebekah found herself using the same techniques with the servant women in the camp, and to her surprise they accepted her completely as part of their gossip circles while they weeded or kneaded or wove or spun. They hadn’t shut her out of their conversations. She simply hadn’t known how to join in.