Rebekah: Women of Genesis by Orson Scott Card Page B

also thy gift, and here I was being proud that I was so clever. Forgive my unworthiness, Lord, forgive me and please, please keep making things work out right. Please make it so Ezbaal doesn’t get angry, and please don’t make Father marry Akyas if she would be awful to him or something. Because if somebody has to be unhappy, let it be me, and not Father.”
     
    She wasn’t sure if her prayer made up for her vanity a moment before, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she lay back down and, after a while, slept.
     

Part II
     
    Unveiled
     

Chapter 4
     
    Rebekah was surprised how Father fretted about the wedding, constantly finding some pretext to summon her to his tent to ask the same questions, over and over.
     
    “I don’t expect her to be pretty,” Father said for the fifth or tenth or twentieth time. “I’m not a boy and she’s not a girl. But why won’t they let me see her?”
     
    Rebekah didn’t even bother to answer anymore. There was no point in scratching the same letters into the dirt. Laban joked that they ought to have engraved all their commiserations in stone and then simply pointed to the appropriate phrases. “It would have saved time.”
     
    “And when it’s time for your wedding,” Rebekah added, “we could reuse them.”
     
    “ I’m not going to marry some girl I’ve never seen,” said Laban.
     
    “Oh, I know,” said Rebekah. “But of course we can’t let her see you in advance.”
     
    “That’s not fair,” Laban said. “Father says I can’t beat you with a stick, and anything less won’t make an impression.”
     
    But with Father there was no joking. “If she’s not ugly or scarred or deformed, why keep her veiled until the wedding?”
     
    Rebekah started to write an explanation, but Father waved away the stick. “You think I won’t know what you’re going to say? You were veiled when he was offering to marry you, so I had to agree to marry Akyas the same way. But I’ve agreed now, so what’s the big mystery?”
     
    Again Rebekah started to write, but only got as far as “His mother and grandmother and . . .”
     
    “But it’s completely different!” Father said. “He had three women examine you, and they got a good look at your face. You said yourself that her face was half hidden under her hair.”
     
    Rebekah wrote, “She’s not a leper.”
     
    “Oh, good. I always wanted to marry a non-leper.”
     
    Rebekah almost wrote a sharp retort, but she knew better and stayed her hand.
     
    “I know what you were going to write. I’m deaf, so I can’t be too fussy.”
     
    That was what she was going to write. But she had to pretend it wasn’t, so instead she wrote, “A link with Ezbaal’s family is a good thing, and . . .”
     
    “And I had to agree to let her worship her own gods, because they had agreed to let you. ”
     
    She wrote: “It’s all my fault, I know . . .”
     
    “It’s not your fault. It’s Pillel’s fault, with all his talk about making an enemy of Ezbaal. Suitors get rejected all the time, and it doesn’t make them enemies!”
     
    She rolled her eyes. The answer to that one was very long and tedious to write, and Father already knew it by now.
     
    “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”
     
    So she flung her arms around him and kissed him hard on the cheek.
     
    “What was that about?”
     
    She parted from the embrace and took his cheeks between her hands. “You are a wonderful father who saved me from a marriage that would have made me miserable.”
     
    “You’re talking too fast for me to read your lips.”
     
    “I love you.”
     
    “Yes, well, you should. The sacrifices we make for our children. The things we give up, so that they can be happy.”
     
    And with that she could leave his tent again, knowing that she’d be summoned back in no time.
     
    Truth to tell, she was puzzled by this business of Akyas marrying Father with a veil on. For all her reassurances to Father, she