the matter in my head. “All right, it will be as you say. But you must treat my aunt with respect and kindness or I shall hear of it and report the arrangement to Haran.”
“I will treat her as I would my own aunt,” he pledged.
“When do you anticipate concluding your business and returning to Alexandria?”
“I had thought it would require weeks, but after only a few days I’m ready to finalize the sale of the house. I will leave for Caesarea in five days in order to take passage on the next merchant ship.” He fixed his eyes on the bag strapped across Lavi’s chest. “Shall we complete our business?”
“I will return in five days with my aunt, arriving early in the morning. You will be paid then, not before.”
His lips curled. “Five days, then.”
xxx.
As Lavi and I drew close to the compound, the aroma of roasting lamb filled my nostrils. “Jesus is home,” I said.
“How can you know this?”
“Smell the air, Lavi. A fatted lamb!”
It would require a considerable event, such as the homecoming of her son, for Mary to trade for something as expensive as a lamb.
“How do you know the scent is not from some other courtyard?” Lavi said.
I quickened my pace. “I know. I just know.”
I reached the gate winded and flushed. Yaltha was sitting near the courtyard oven, where Mary, Salome, Judith, and Berenice were busy turning the lamb on a spit. I went to my aunt, kneeling down to embrace her. “Your husband is home,” she said. “He arrived last evening. I didn’t tell him about your father, but I explained your absence before James had a chance to give his account of it.”
“I will go to him,” I said. “Where is he?”
“He has been in the workshop all morning. But first, did you persuade Apion?”
“He was persuaded not by me, but by one thousand drachmae.”
“A thousand . . . How did you come by such riches?”
“It’s a long story, and not one I wish overheard. It will keep.”
The women had scarcely greeted me, but as I ran toward the workshop, Judith called out, “If you’d heeded James’s commandment not to leave, you would’ve been here to greet your husband.”
Her tongue was a pestilence. “His commandment? Did James receive it on a stone tablet? Did God speak to him from a burning bush?”
Judith huffed, and I caught sight of Salome swallowing her laugh.
* * *
? ? ?
JESUS SET DOWN the cross-saw he was sharpening. I’d not seen him for more than five months and he looked like a stranger. His hair hung long about his shoulders. His skin was darker and razed by desert winds, all the edges of his face severe. He seemed so much older than his thirty years.
“You’ve been gone too long,” I said, letting my hands rest on his chest. I wanted to feel him, the flesh of him. “And you’re too thin. Is that why Mary has a banquet in the making?”
He kissed my forehead. He said nothing about my red scarf. His only words: “I’ve missed you, Little Thunder.”
We sat down on the workbench. “Yaltha said you were in Sepphoris,” he said. “Tell me all that has happened since I’ve been gone.”
I described Lavi’s unexpected appearance. “He brought me news,” I said. “My father is dead.”
“I’m sorry, Ana. I know what it’s like to lose a father.”
“Mine was nothing like your father,” I said. “When Nazareth treated you as a mamzer, your father protected you. Mine tried to make me the tetrarch’s concubine.”
“Is there nothing good you can say of him?”
Jesus’s capacity for mercy baffled me. I didn’t know if I could give up the wrongs my father had done, the way I hauled them around like an ossuary of precious old bones. Jesus made it seem as if one could just lay them down.
“I can say one thing for him,” I said. “One thing. My father sometimes provided me with tutors, papyri, and