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

He finished off his vodka and put the empty, sweating glass down on the coffee table. "You should have telephoned me at work," he said. "Then I would have had time to let Mother know she would have three more at the table tonight."

"I couldn't," I said quickly. "The phone operators' strike, remember? No calls are going through." Though the truth was, I wouldn't have called him at work anyway. And now it would be too late to go to Lena's, there was no way to telephone her, and besides, the brisket was already done. Ed would not let a cooked brisket go to waste. "Come on," I said to him, sitting down on the couch next to him and gently reaching my hand around to the back of his neck. "Let's eat." Ed had a thick neck, and I could feel it was knotted with tenseness. I rubbed it softly with my fingers, hoping it would calm him.

David picked that moment to accidentally knock his stack of yellows over so that they scattered all about the floor. I watched as his mouth turned from content to aghast in a matter of seconds, and his face turned bright red, his eyes welling with tears.

Ed pulled out of my grasp and he stood, clearly agitated now. David kicked the floor, making loud, booming thuds over and over again. "Do something with him, would you?" Ed demanded. And he walked back into the kitchen.

I went to David and held on to him, trying to soothe him by picking the yellows back up, stacking them again, but this time David knocked them back over intentionally. I wasn't supposed to yell. I was supposed to give him extra love, Dr. Greenberg had said, so I hugged his small body to me tightly. I rocked him back and forth and back and forth until his breathing evened and his crying stopped. "I wish you could just tell me what you were thinking," I whispered into his soft curls. "Wouldn't that be a whole lot easier for both of us?" But the only sound I heard came from the kitchen: Ed pouring another vodka.

I led David to the table, where I handed him his cup of milk, and then I walked into the narrow kitchen and put my hand on Ed's shoulder. "Come on," I said to him. "Let's sit down and light our candles and eat. David has calmed down, and the meat is growing cold. We can still celebrate the Shabbat together as a family in our nice new apartment."

Ed finished off his second vodka, and I could feel the tension ease from his shoulders. He put the glass in the sink and nodded.

LATER, Ed and I lay on opposite sides of our hard mattress, not quite touching. The room was still, but I could hear the even sounds of David asleep, breathing in his crib, and the sounds of the neighbors next door, who I hadn't met yet, their bed springs squeaking up and down and up and down. It was clear what they were doing in there, and I hoped it wouldn't give Ed any ideas.

Ed wanted another child, another boy, so very badly. We had been married only a month when I got pregnant with David, and we had barely known each other but everything had seemed like a grand adventure to me then. Playing house with a man and a child in the one-room apartment above my mother's—it was such a relief to be doing what I always thought and dreamed I would—leaving my days as a working girl at the factory behind for a quiet domesticity.

My marriage to Ed was something my mother and Lena cooked up one evening a few years ago at a Hadassah meeting. Lena had for years tried to bring Ed to New York, but it was not as easy to emigrate from Russia in the '40s, during the war, as it had been when Bubbe Kasha and Zayde Jerome came in 1901 with my mother. Lena had finally gotten him here at the end of '43 and then she had to marry him off, of course. Ed had been living in New York only a month when I first saw him, and he was ten years older than me. Back then I'd still been working at the Cupid Garment Factory with Susan. The work there was easy, and though I took no particular joy in sewing, I liked the camaraderie with the other girls there, all just like me, young, unmarried, unfettered. But my friends at the factory started getting engaged one by one, including Susan. I feared I might become a spinster, stuck sewing forever. Ed appeared to be the answer to everything.

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.