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

His mouth would twitch slightly at the mention of Jake's name, and I'd wonder if maybe it might even be a little smile.

Jake's here, I tell myself instead. All I have to do is find Jake.

And I shut the car door and begin running up the road.

1947
1

The first time I ever saw Ethel Rosenberg, she was round and bright as a beach ball. She stood on the sidewalk in front of our building at 10 Monroe Street in Knickerbocker Village, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses in one hand, her little boy in the other, and despite all her brightness and girth I might not have even noticed her at all if it hadn't been for David, who decided at the very moment we walked by her to reach up and swipe the roses from her hand.

I saw them in a blur, yellow and green flashes tumbling all over the sidewalk, and then Ethel let out a short, startled cry.

"David!" I yelled at him, realizing what he'd done. "What's wrong with you?" David was almost two, but he wasn't prone to tantrums, fits of rage, or grabbing things from strangers on the street. But then I realized what it was—the yellow. David was recently infatuated with the color, drawing circles for hours with his yellow crayons. Suns, I would tell him, begging him to repeat the word after me, but he kept drawing his yellow circles without even the slightest sound.

I bent down to gather up the flowers, and I noticed David was crying silently. He hated it when I yelled at him, and I immediately felt bad for being so cross. It was exactly what Dr. Greenberg had told me not to do, and here I was, doing it anyway. "I'm so sorry," I murmured, handing Ethel back her flowers. "He didn't mean to . . ."

"Yes he did," her little boy shot back at me. I judged him to be older than David, though I couldn't be sure how much, and he spoke to me like that, so clearly and completely. And rudely . . .

I nodded at him. David had meant to. But what else was there to say?

We had lived on Monroe Street only a week by then—David, Ed, and I—and I had thought, however stupidly at the time, that it might change us. The outdoor playground, the scores of other children, the loving families that nested all about Knickerbocker Village like indigenous birds, that somehow we would become shiny like all the rest of them just by virtue of living here. But aside from the steam heat, the laundry room, and the elevators, nothing was different in Knickerbocker Village than it had been in our efficiency above my mother's apartment on Delancey Street.

"It's all right," Ethel said. "They're only flowers. And you've gathered them all back up. No harm done, see, John?" She handed the bouquet to her boy and she turned back to me. She patted David on the head and his sobs worsened, shaking his shoulders, but he still did not make a sound. "You're new around here?" she asked, turning back toward me, her voice clear and sweet now.

I hugged David close to my hip, willing him to stop so that we might have a moment to befriend someone in the building. So far the other mothers at the playground had eyed me and David with trepidation. And why shouldn't they? When David would only sit by himself, silently stacking rocks in even piles, while all the other children laughed and shouted and ran around the courtyard together.

"I'm Millie Stein." I reached out for her hand to shake it. "And this is my son, David." Her grip was firm but delicate, yet her fingers looked decidedly swollen, like the kosher sausages Mr. Bergman sold in the butcher shop.

"Millie," she said. "Nice to meet you. I'm Ethel Rosenberg. And this is John."

"You live here, in Knickerbocker Village?" I asked her. "I haven't seen you at the playground yet."

She looked down. "We don't get to the playground too often these days," she said softly. I assumed it was because of her large, heaving belly, her being so firmly in the family way—about eight months along, I judged—remembering how uncomfortable I'd been at that stage and trying to imagine feeling that way with another child to tote along.

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.