Excerpt from The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It didn't hurt that he was very nice to look at. He was tall, with a thick head of brown hair. He had very nice broad shoulders and a squarish nose that sat firmly in the center of his face. The first time I ever saw him, inside Lena's threadbare apartment, he was sitting at Lena's worn table, looking at me shyly, his hands shaking a little as we were introduced. He was nervous in front of me at first, a quality I found endearing.

I wasn't lucky—or even beautiful—like Susan, who had known and loved Sam practically forever. He'd grown up down the street from us on Delancey and he'd gone to high school with us. We'd always known he and Susan would get married, and they did, just after he came home from the war. But I'd had no one, and with all the men gone, and my thirties rapidly approaching, it had seemed I might never find anyone, that I might live on Delancey with my mother and Bubbe Kasha forever. And then I saw Ed there at Lena's kitchen table so eager to please me, for me to like him, and a few weeks later, when he asked, I agreed to marry him.

I never thought about the years and years that would stretch ahead in our marriage, making the life that lay ahead of me sometimes feel like an impossibly long and arduous void. I didn't know about the way Ed would drink too much vodka when things bothered him or the way Ed would need another child that I might not be ready to have. Ed was so happy when David was first born. Ed's younger American-born brother, Leo, had so far given Lena only two granddaughters, and here Ed, always trying to prove himself to Lena after so many years away from her in Russia, had produced the first grandson, a boy to carry on the family name. But since it had become clear that David might not exactly be a normal, perfect boy, Ed had become obsessed with having another. It felt to me he wished to throw David away as you would wayward garbage. Ed had grown so cold and distant with David in a way I could not understand nor accept, that it often occurred to me now how little I had ever really even known Ed—or loved him—at all.

Suddenly his hand reached across the bed for my thigh, and I noticed the bed springs were now silent in the apartment next door. Ed's fingers pushed up my leg gently, but in a way that now made me feel sick to my stomach. If we didn't have another child, Ed would not be able give up on David.

"Not tonight . . . I'm bleeding," I said to him.

"Again?" He moved his hand. "Maybe you should see the doctor, Mildred." He sighed. "Maybe there is something wrong with you?"

"There's nothing wrong with me," I said, wondering how long I could keep this up without Ed growing suspicious. It had been six months of us "trying" so far with nothing happening. "Dr. Greenberg says it just takes time, that's all. David isn't even two yet."

But Ed didn't say anything else and his silence hung there, an emptiness between us, as I wondered what he was thinking, if he knew I was lying. He rolled over and I could feel the weight of his back, leaning into the mattress. A few minutes later, he was snoring.

4

On Monday morning, my mother, Bubbe Kasha, David, and I waited in the pouring rain in a very long line on Monroe Street to get our smallpox vaccines. I was flanked by David and Bubbe Kasha, while my mother stood just in front of us, complaining about her hip hurting, as it always did in the rain. Bubbe Kasha was confused, as she tended to be these days, and kept asking why we were in line.

David, blissfully now, said nothing and clutched tightly to my hand as I tried to shield both him and Bubbe Kasha from the rain with my umbrella, all the while getting soaked myself. There were so many people and we were packed tightly in line, water rushing over us. My brown dress was soaked and my bones ached, and I thought maybe smallpox would be better than this, especially since my mother kept talking, as she always did. "I hear the man who started this epidemic carried it in from Mexico and then spread it all through the city like a sewer rat. Imagine, the gall of some people." She was talking too loudly, something she had begun doing lately, which I took to mean her hearing wasn't as good as it used to be, and several strangers in line stared at her suspiciously. She seemed not to notice and shook her head, right into my umbrella, sending rainwater tumbling over both David and Bubbe Kasha until I repositioned.

Excerpted from The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor. Copyright © 2015 by Jillian Cantor. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.