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

Time had also reported that the American family was thriving as never before, that the average man and woman now hoped for three children. Susan was well on her way, but three? I couldn't imagine. I could barely even imagine two, of taking care of David and a baby, and so I had taken special and quite secret steps to make sure this would not happen.

Ed was none the wiser. Ed, who had repeatedly told me that all the fears about the bomb here were silly.

It's never going to happen in New York, he always said, waving the concerns away with the trail of smoke from his cigar, and I didn't understand how he could be so certain about a city he had known only for a short time. Women have many babies, he told me. That's what they do. He whispered it in my ear at night like a love song, in his thick Russian accent, just before he took his pants off and rolled on top of me.

WHEN THE ELEVATOR at long last stopped on the eleventh floor and the door opened, David and I nearly ran right into Ethel again, as she was waiting to ride the elevator down. But this time, she was alone.

"So we meet again," Ethel said, and she laughed, as David and I stepped out. I wondered what had happened to John and how Ethel managed to be going out without him. Since David had begun showing some peculiarities in his behavior, my mother had lost interest in watching him, so now he was always with me. Sometimes I dreamed about the solace of being alone, even if only for an hour. And I was torn for a moment between feeling jealous of Ethel and excited that she lived on the same floor as us. Perhaps we really could be friends, and I imagined David playing with John, me sharing afternoon coffee with Ethel. It had been a while since I'd had a friend this close by, not since before David was born. On Delancey all my old friends had married before me and moved or we'd drifted apart, and in the room above my mother's apartment our only companions had been her and Bubbe Kasha.

But Ethel propped open the elevator door with her thick fingers and seemed a bit impatient for us to get out, shuffling her feet as if she were in a hurry. David reached for the elevator buttons again, and I grabbed for his hands. "No. No more buttons, darling," I told him, and he shrank until his eyes caught onto Ethel's dress, the same bright yellow-and-red one as earlier, but now I noticed her brown curls were also topped with a dramatic red hat. Ethel was quite short, a few inches shorter than my very average height, but she held herself in such a way that I hadn't noticed it earlier on the street.

"I have to run," she said, pushing past us into the elevator. "I have studio time and I'm late."

"Studio time? You're on the radio?"

"Oh, no." She laughed. "I'm making a recording for my John so he'll have my voice to listen to when I'm in the hospital for the new baby."

"Oh," I said. "How lovely."

She smiled and touched her free hand to her hat shyly, in a way that made me think someone else had told her this was not such a lovely idea. I wondered about her husband and if he was like Ed when it came to money. I guessed not. Studio time sounded expensive.

"I should have you and John over sometime," I said as I watched her press the button to go down to the ground floor.

But before she had time to answer, the elevator doors shut and Ethel was riding down to her studio.

OUR APARTMENT WAS DARK, the air inside quiet and cool. Ed was still at work, and I prayed David would actually lie down and take a nap so I could have a little time to myself.

I switched on the lights, unwrapped the brisket, and put it in the oven, and after I settled David into his crib, which I understood he was getting way too big for but was trying to follow Dr. Greenberg's advice to coddle him just a little while longer, I lit myself a cigarette and sat at our scratched wooden table. The Sabbath was only a few hours away, and Susan and Sam and the twins would arrive before sundown. They never took the twins on the train into the city, but tonight they had decided to make an exception in order to see our new place.

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.