The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J Church Page B

of water trying to soothe my tongue and throat. Watching me, Alden laughed.
    “It’s a New Mexican test, you know. How hot you can stand your chile. A measure of your cojones .”
    “My what?” I choked, dipped my napkin in my water glass, and applied the water directly to what I was sure were blisters indicative of third-degree burns, at least.
    “Balls, my dear.”
    “Balls?”
    “Your manhood, your macho status.”
    “Oh. And I’m supposed to want that?”
    “Meri, you are that. You are one ballsy woman. The ballsiest I’ve ever known.”
    “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
    “It was meant as one.” Alden took a bite of his pork tamale. “You’ve done a good job this summer. You’ve made the best of things, taken care of yourself.”
    “Isn’t that what you expected?”
    “It’s what I knew you could do. It’s not what other men’s wives have done.” I let what he’d said sink in. I felt pride, but it was tinged with something else, something I couldn’t identify. “And soon, Meri. Soon, maybe we’ll be together permanently.”
    “Are you telling me something?”
    “No. No, I’m not. I am emphatically not telling you anything.”
    “How wonderful it would be not to have to part.” I reached across the table and pulled a lock of his hair until it was straight. It extended past his collar. There were sopaipilla crumbs in his mustache. He kissed my wrist and then returned my hand to my side of the table so that he could continue eating. I could hear the rasp of cicadas in the trees lining the street outside.
    After a few minutes, Alden pushed back from the table, and we both lit up, exhaling smoke toward the wood-beamed ceiling. “I know a purported cure for too-hot chile,” he said.
    “Do tell.” It had been a good meal. I felt my shoulders relaxing away from my ears, and I was sure he’d say the cure was making love.
    “Ice cream.”
    “Ice cream?”
    “Yes.”
    “All right. I believe you.”
    “You should always believe me, Meri. I will never lie to you.”
    I knew he meant it. It’s keeping promises, not making them, that is the impossible thing.

A Tidings of Magpies
1. Gregarious birds, magpies are intelligent, opportunistic, and bold.
2. The magpie is viewed by some cultures as an omen of bad news; other cultures consider the bird a messenger of good tidings.
    During my senior year, I missed Alden so, and I sought out distractions. In September, Kitty, Red, and I saw Bette Davis marry an older man to save her brother from embezzlement charges in Mr. Skeffington , and Mother wrote that she was canning peaches. October had one of the most beautiful harvest moons I’d ever seen, a rich, gold disc hovering ripe over the horizon. As a surprise for Alden when I next saw him, Kitty and Red borrowed a car so they could teach me to drive, and we sweet-talked everyone we knew into donating gasoline ration coupons so we could refill the tank with ethyl.
    Alden couldn’t break free for the holidays, and the weather was so awful that I left Mother in the capable hands of her many Somerset County cousins while I stayed in Chicago, sharing Christmas with Mrs. Hudson and the other boarders who had no place else to go. A small part of me secretly hoped that Alden would appear on Christmas Eve, make a big surprise of it, but I was wrong. I chastised myself for having harbored such little-girl wishes.
    We slipped into 1945, and Alden’s letters became increasingly sparse—his work was frantic, the pressures great. I continued to write to him, although at times it felt as if I were sending letters like fragile paper airplanes out across some abyss. We weren’t communicating—not really. My letters to him were more like journal entries or lists of what I’d done in any given week.
    I began to feel as if I weren’t truly married, not in the sense of any marriage I’d ever seen. I told myself that other women lived alone while their husbands were fighting overseas, and I suspected they