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

"And how is Ed?" Mr. Bergman asked, his voice taking on a slightly higher pitch, a peculiar end note. I often thought Mr. Bergman saw Ed the way Ed's mother, Lena, saw me. With disdain and mistrust. Though I couldn't imagine that Mr. Bergman knew much about me and Ed, beneath the surface, it was almost as if some shadow of my father still existed within him. He worried about me.

"Ed is well," I said. Our weekly dance.

Mr. Bergman frowned. "And he isn't having a problem at work with this loyalty oath everyone is talking about now?"

"Why should he?" I asked, though I swallowed hard, not willing to admit to Mr. Bergman that I had already worried as much but had been afraid to broach the subject with Ed myself. Ed clung to his Russian past like a winter coat, something that enveloped him absolutely even though it had been four years since he'd come to America.

"I just thought . . . Well, never mind." Mr. Bergman waved his hand in the air. Behind us another customer demanded service by clearing her throat loudly and talking in Yiddish to what looked like her mother. Mr. Bergman held up his hand to indicate he'd be with her in a moment.

"Millie," he said, leaning over across the meat case so he could lower his voice to a whisper. "I'm worried about you. Things are not the same as they used to be for a Russian Jew in New York. It's not like it was when our relatives came over forty years ago." Mr. Bergman shook his head. "They say Stalin is the next Hitler, you know? And what will happen if he gets the bomb?"

"You worry too much," I told him, and I grabbed my brisket and David and headed back toward Knickerbocker Village.

2

Mr. Bergman was not the only one who worried about the bomb. The truth was, I thought of it often—we all did—the idea that this utterly destructive thing could come suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, all the way across the ocean from Russia, instantly turning New York City into dust. We could be the next Hiroshima, Nagasaki. And no amount of blush could hide this fear.

As David and I walked through the front entrance of 10 Monroe Street, I imagined the bomb coming just then, the imprint of our bodies etched forever wordlessly in the ground where the two thirteen-story brick buildings of Knickerbocker Village once stood, our remnants just shadows, nothing more. In midtown, Ed's body would become a shadow beneath his office building. And somewhere across the ocean, Stalin would be laughing at us.

But it didn't happen, and David and I rode the elevator back up to the eleventh floor as peacefully as we'd come down an hour earlier, stopping at each floor along the way, as David wanted each button to light up yellow. I allowed him to do it if only to keep him from crying again.

On the long ride up, I thought about my sister, Susan. She and her husband, Sam, had retreated to the suburbs of Elizabeth last year shortly before the twins were born. Susan told me there was safety in the suburbs, that no one would think to bomb there because life was more spread out, slower, less people as targets. And Time magazine had recently reported the same thing. Not that I was surprised, as Susan was always right—or, at least, she acted as if she were. I wondered if Ed and I would've been safer and happier there, too, rather than here in Knickerbocker Village, but Ed had insisted on staying in the city so he'd be closer to work and to his mother. And since Susan had left, I knew I needed to stay, too. Someone had to be close by for my mother and Bubbe Kasha. Besides, Ed was giving me steam heat, an elevator, a playground, and, at some point, even a nursery school for David. And our one-bedroom apartment here on the eleventh floor was quite an upgrade from our tiny one-room apartment on Delancey.

And as Ed said, with an accusing lilt to his thick Russian accent, why did we need any more than this with only one child?

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.