Chapter 26 | A New Name
It was near midday when the sun makes the stones sweat. Lavi and I sat on the stoop with bread and olives between us. He bit an olive, then turned it in his fingers like he was thinking about what to say.
“Talia?” he asked, carefully.
“Yes?”
“My parents…” He swallowed. “They aren’t coming back, are they?”
The courtyard thinned around us. I could hear bees in the thyme wall and the slow knock of Abba’s staff somewhere inside.
“I don’t know what happened to them,” I said, truth plain as bread. “But I don’t think they’re coming.” I set the bread down. “If you want a different house, I will find one with kind people and a good wall.”
His chin jerked up. “No.” Then softer, fierce. “No. I want this wall. I want you.”
Something loosened under my ribs, and I couldn’t help but smile.
Toda Elohim. Thank you God.
“Then you are stuck with me,” I said, and my voice shook.
He looked at the olives, then at me, then back at the olives like courage might be hiding under one. “Can I—” He stopped, flushed, tried again. “Can I call you Ima?”
The word went through me like light through a shutter. I couldn’t speak. So I simply nodded.
He grinned so hard his eyes disappeared, then leaned back and shouted to the empty blue above the courtyard, testing how the name carried. “Ima!”
I laughed—an unguarded sound I barely recognized as mine. “Not so loud,” I said, wiping my cheeks with the heel of my hand. “You’ll wake the vines.”
He tried the word again, softer, like a secret: “Ima.”
“Yes, my boy,” I said. “Yes.”
We finished the bread. I sent him for the coil of new line, then rose and brushed the crumbs from my skirt. The sun had climbed high enough to press heat into the stones, and the air over the rows shimmered faintly where the day had begun to settle into itself.
“Don’t forget the smaller knife,” I called after him.
“I won’t, Ima,” he called back at once, far too pleased with himself.
I shook my head, though I could not help smiling.
Soon, Baruch was down near the lower terrace sorting cut clusters into baskets—good fruit to one side, bruised to the other, his movements slow but sure.
Abba sat in the courtyard with a basket in his lap, sorting out the stems before pressing.
He was trying to do more, and did it with a seriousness that made it seem no small task.
“They’ll be here soon,” I said, trying to sound casual.
Baruch glanced up. “Who?”
“James and John.”
“They sent word yesterday,” I added, bending to lift a basket. “Said they could spare a day.”
Baruch’s mouth twitched. “How generous.”
I chose not to respond to that.
But, the heat in my face rose anyway, and I busied myself with baskets near the wall.
~
The sound of voices drifted up from the lower road not long after—men’s voices, easy and familiar with each other. Lavi reached the corner of the house as they came into view, line and knife clutched in his arms, curls wild, feet dusty.
John stepped through the gate first, greeting Abba with a respectful nod before setting down the basket he had carried in. It wasn’t empty—flatbread wrapped in cloth, a few small dried fish tucked carefully inside.
James followed behind him with another, swinging it lightly from one hand.
“Our ima sent us with food,” he said. “Said if we helped but ate you out of house and home, it wouldn’t be much help at all.”
I glanced at the basket, then back at them. “That was thoughtful of her.” I hesitated. “And of you.”
My gaze lingered a moment longer than I intended. “So you brought bread and fish.”
James’s mouth curved. “You’d be surprised what can be done with bread and fish.”
“Mmhmm,” I muttered.
I found myself looking at him in the bright sun. Standing there—solid, sun-browned, broad through the shoulders. The vineyard looked narrower with him standing in it.
He smiled at me.
I dropped my gaze, then recovered. “So, you found us again,” I said, trying for dry and almost succeeding.
James’s eyes found mine at once. “You say that like it was difficult.”
John grinned. “She says most things like they are difficult.”
“Can’t make it too easy for the Sons of Thunder,” I said.
“I would be disappointed if you did,” James replied.
John glanced upward in quiet exasperation.
Lavi hurried toward them, greeting them with quick, eager hugs and his bright smile, then stopped short, remembering himself. “Ima said—” He cut himself off, but too late.
The word hung there.
James stilled.
John’s brows rose, just slightly.
I looked at him, nodding my approval.
“Ima said you were coming!” he said gleefully.
My face warmed at once, though I kept my chin level and reached for the grapes Lavi had half-tucked into his hand. “These go to the baskets for sorting,” I said. “Not into your mouth.”
Lavi only grinned and then ran off to join Baruch in the eastern rows.
James, John, and I started toward the terraces together.
James’s gaze stayed on me another moment before he said, quieter now, “A new name then?”
I looked at him. Then down briefly.
“Yes, and it’s the best one.” I said smiling.
He smiled too.
“It suits you.”
The space between us narrowed in a way that had nothing to do with the rows.
John, to his credit, said nothing. He only cleared his throat and lifted one of the baskets. “Where do you want us?”
“Lower terrace first,” I said. “The western row is heavier than I expected, and the baskets near the olive wall need sorted.”
“We can do that,” James said.
We fell into the work.
Baruch and Lavi worked a stretch of their own to the east, but not for long.
Little by little, their path bent closer—whether by need or curiosity, I couldn’t say—until the space between us disappeared.
Even Abba came out with a jug of water for everyone and, without a word, set to work among the rows.
“How are the rows I tied?” James asked after a while, lifting a cluster and turning it in the light.
“You mean The Fisherman’s Way?” Lavi shouted from a few rows over.
I shot him a look, then glanced at the loosened rows nearby and huffed softly. “Surviving.”
“Only surviving?”
Lavi laughed. “Your way works great!”
“Hush,” I said.
Baruch, stooped over a basket, gave a rough chuckle. “Don’t tell him that. He’ll never stop talking.”
James looked up. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to.”
John leaned over the trellis with a grin. “We all know you’ve been waiting to hear it.”
James straightened. “Hear what?”
I kept my eyes on the fruit in my hands.
Lavi piped up at once. “That you were right.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Lavi.”
“What?” he asked, entirely unrepentant. “You said we couldn’t tell him because he’d brag.”
John laughed outright. Baruch shook his head and kept sorting. Even Abba’s shoulders moved once with what might have been a chuckle.
James, naturally, looked pleased with himself.
“I do not brag,” he said.
John barked a laugh. “That may be the boldest lie ever spoken in this vineyard.”
James reached across and knocked lightly at the post between them with the back of his knuckles. “Mind your work.”
“I am minding it,” John said. “I’m also enjoying this.”
The rows fell again into rhythm after that, and the ease remained. Lavi moved through it all with a brightness that had not been in him for weeks, and every time he called me Ima, whether for instruction or pride or the simple pleasure of hearing it answered, I felt the word strike me anew.
By the fourth or fifth time, James looked over at the sound of it with something close to wonder in his face—not at the word itself, but at what it meant.
A little while later, he straightened from his row and glanced down it, measuring something only he could see.
“That’s done,” he said.
I didn’t look up. “Already?”
“Not much left worth taking,” he replied, stepping over into my row without waiting to be invited. “Better clusters on this side.”
I opened my mouth to argue, the words already forming—then stopped. I couldn’t say why. It would have been easy to send him back. It would have been expected.
Instead, I shifted slightly to make room, though there wasn’t much to give.
The vines pressed close, heavy with fruit, and before long we were working nearer than we needed to be. Close enough that I was aware of him in a way I hadn’t been before.
I told myself it was nothing. That this was work. That he had only come over because it made sense.
Still, my hands slowed.
Lost in that thought, I reached for a cluster at the same moment he did.
Our hands touched.
His fingers closed around the stem right below mine, warm and rough. I felt the shape of his hand before I thought to pull away, and for one thunderous heartbeat neither of us moved.
I could hear Lavi talking to John somewhere behind us. Could hear the faint scrape of basket against dirt, the leaves rustling overhead, the buzz of a stubborn bee drunk on sweetness.
But I could also feel the heat of him at my side. The line of his shoulder near mine. The faint scent of sweat.
And strange as it was, I thought, absurdly, that he smelled good.
Not perfumed. Not clean in the polished, city way of men like Silas or Uncle Eleazar.
Honest. Salt and labor and sun and something alive beneath it.
I let go first, pulling my hand back and reaching for another cluster, pretending nothing had happened. He did the same, though slower.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then I cleared my throat, steadied my hands, and tried to remember what I had been doing before he stepped into my row.
“I need to tell you something,” I said, because apparently my mouth had abandoned all caution for the day.
He looked at me. “Yes?”
“I…” I tried again. “I believe…”
A flicker of mischief touched his mouth. “You believe what? That it’s going to rain? That grapes are better than figs?”
I stared at him. “No,” I said.
I held his gaze. He stared back, stubborn, waiting.
“I believe,” I said again, firmer.
He tilted his head slightly. “In…?”
Of course he was going to make me say it.
I sighed and then let out a loud huff.
“I believe Jesus is the Messiah.”
The change in his face was immediate and quiet and real. Whatever else he was—arrogant, reckless, infuriating—he was not false. Joy moved through him without disguise.
Then—
“Oh that?” he said lightly. “I knew that.”
I frowned. “Wait. You knew?”
His mouth curved.
Before he could answer, John’s head appeared over the row. “You think you could tell all the women and we wouldn’t know?”
I jumped.
He grinned. “Yes, I’m still here. I know—you two were lost in each other’s eyes and all that.”
“We were not,” I said at once.
“Mhm.”
He straightened, then his expression gentled. “I’m happy for you too, sister.”
“Thank you…” I looked at him again. “Wait—sister?”
John shrugged, though there was something warm in it. “Well, I figure it’s only a matter of time.”
James made a low sound and reached over the trellis to swat his brother’s arm.
John laughed and dodged away, lifting a basket before James could do it again. “What? I’m only speaking truth.”
“Try speaking less of it,” James muttered, but he was smiling now despite himself.
Lavi, who had clearly understood only half of what had passed, looked delighted anyway. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly.
“Something,” John said at the same time.
Baruch muttered, “Lord, spare us,” and lifted another basket.
The work resumed, though it no longer felt like it had before.
I bent to the row again, fingers moving almost on their own, but my mind had gone elsewhere.
To them. Not only James. Though James, certainly.
It had been there from the start, hadn’t it?
That pull. Not merely to him, but to all of them—their noise, their ease.
The way they ribbed one another without cruelty.
The way John knew exactly how far to tease before retreating.
The way James could be all rough edges one moment and then stand in a row of grapes looking at me as though my joy mattered to him.
The way their family gathered people in without asking them to become someone else first.
I had noticed it at the wedding. Felt it near the shore. Envied it, though I had not named it.
Could I step into it now? Not only the work, and the belief, but them?
For so long, my world had been small—Abba and me, and even he had been gone from me in his grief. I had carried things alone longer than I wanted to admit.
My gaze moved over the vineyard—Baruch steady at his task, Lavi still talking, still bright, Abba clearer now, moving among the rows with quiet, sure hands.
Then to James. To John.
I thought of Zebedee and Salome. Mira. Ruth. Even blunt Malka—especially blunt Malka.
The others too. The ones who followed Him—Jesus.
The word grew within me before I could stop it.
Family.
I lowered my head slightly.
Toda, Adonai.
Thank You, Lord.
For family.