“All right, I’ll tell people you’re lazy and all your cooking tastes like dung, so nobody will marry you and we can keep you running things here forever.”

“Yes, your wife would love to have me around all her life.”

“I don’t have a wife, and as long as you’re here, I can’t think of any reason why I should get one.”

At which Rebekah rolled her eyes, since she knew and Laban knew that he had already fallen in love three times—with completely unsuitable girls, of course—and wherever he went, well-favored daughters were trotted out and their needlework shown to him and their cooking fed to him.

For that matter, whenever a visitor came to Bethuel’s tent, he was fed Rebekah’s cooking and shown Rebekah’s workmanship—not just weaving and sewing, but fields of beans and vegetables, and stores of cheeses, smoked meats, and oils and wines that had been acquired in trade for the wovenwork of the women who toiled under her guidance. But Father knew better than to try to show her. Instead, the visitors merely glimpsed her, veiled, as she went about her business. And because she did not have to hear what was said about her, she was able to pretend that she did not know it was said, or that many a visitor’s main business in Father’s tent was to offer fine gifts for him to pass along to her. Father always declined the gifts, of course, but he turned their visits into profitable trade when he could. He did not trouble her with tales that would only make her upset.

But now that she was of a marriageable age, it was inevitable that one of the supplicants would so please Father that he would begin to think that perhaps this man or that one might be a good son-in-law.

Through it all, however, Rebekah grew less and less interested in the prospect of marriage. Didn’t she already have all the work of a wife? Except the actual bearing of children, and she’d helped with enough births to know just how pleasant that could be. She loved children and was good with them, but there was no shortage of children among the servants in her father’s household, and if she wasn’t the mother of any of them, she was, in a sense, the mother of all, since she ruled over the household women and all the children still at breast or knee. So what would marriage bring her, except the pain of childbirth and the loneliness of being taken away from all she knew and all she loved?