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.