Betrothal
(Mark 15:40)
“I could use a woman like you.”
I had heard it before from men who mistook my vivacity for flirtation,
my unbound hair as a sign of promiscuity.
But something in the way he said it made me drop the mending,
ignore Martha’s hollering, and leave.
At first, it was what I feared; filling the waterskins, listening to his friends argue
while I looked for wine, cleaning up after immense dinner parties.
But later, it became caring for the ill, and pulling him from a fistfight
in his father’s house on a holiday.
Finally, it was speaking, head uncovered, before spoken to.
Sitting. Listening. Waiting.
When Martha begged me to come home, he smiled. “I’m coming with you.”
I thought he meant for good.
Martha met us in the road, screaming that my brother was dead.
Hurrying home, he murmured: “You know how she gets. I’m sure he’s just asleep.”
When I saw my brother’s face, ashen and set in stone, I wasn’t sure.
So when I saw the pair of them step from the room a few minutes later,
I dropped the jar of perfume I brought for Martha. It broke and spattered at his feet.
Wiping them with a towel, I heard him say: “I think it’s time you met my mother.”
And I did—
over bread and wine in a borrowed upper room while he chatted with his friends.
As we stood alone that windy hill the next day,
she held my hand and wiped my tears.
Telling me things weren’t what they seemed.
That she thought of me as a daughter.
That she had been waiting for something like this to happen.
A few days later, standing open-mouthed in a puddle of spices, broken crockery, and spilled oil,
she squeezed my hand and told me that it was all right.
She missed him too.
