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

Susan had yet to bring the twins into the city under any conditions, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. "Smallpox outbreak?" I'd heard nothing of it yet, but I hadn't listened to the radio all morning. David did not like the sound and he would cry when I'd turn it on—more evidence that he could at least hear. I'd asked Ed for a television, hoping that David would be drawn more to it, the visual stimulus, but he'd yet to oblige what he called my expensive whims.

"There's going to be inoculation clinics in the streets starting Monday," my mother said. "We'll go. You'll come for me in the morning."

"Is that really necessary?" I murmured, thinking ahead to the way David would react to an inoculation in the street. It had been bad enough when Dr. Greenberg had inoculated him for whooping cough in the office, after I'd read the terrifying article about it in Parents. David had clung to the examining table and kicked and cried such hard, silent tears that I thought his entire small body might burst.

"You should want to die of smallpox instead?" my mother asked, putting her hands on her wide hips. She wore her pale gray dress like a sack, and her hands revealed the lumpiness of her large stomach underneath.

Would I want to die of smallpox? It seemed closer, more immediate than Stalin's bomb, but I also imagined the process would be slower and more painful. Should the bomb come and take us, I might never even know what happened. And it would take me and David, instantly and simultaneously. What would happen to David if I should die of something else on my own?

"Of course not," I said to my mother. "I'll come by for you Monday morning." I paused. "You'll still come for dinner tonight, though? And Bubbe Kasha, too?"

"Oh goodness no. I feel like I'm risking my life just having come here. All these people living here in one place. All the germs that could be in that . . . elevator."

"Well, then you should have sent a telegram," I said, unable to keep the annoyance I was feeling with her from my voice. I had been looking forward to the dinner with my family, my sister—perfect babies and all—and now it would just be Ed and me and David. Alone. I had a brisket enough to feed at least ten. And there was no option to skip Shabbat, not for Ed anyway.

"You should want for me to spend money on a telegram when I can use my own two feet?" She waved her hand in the air, blew me a kiss, and then as quickly as she'd come she was gone.

From the back room I heard the sounds of the crib bars rattling. David was awake.

3

I was raised Jewish—and only the second generation in America at that. My grandparents came over from Russia in 1901, but for them, and later for me, our religion always felt more cultural than spiritual. Growing up, Shabbat dinner was something we'd attend at Bubbe Kasha's and Zayde Jerome's apartment, but not every week. Only when my father felt like it. Some weeks he was too tired and wanted to stay in our apartment and rest, which to him meant eating my mother's terrible split pea soup, smoking a cigarette, and then listening to Jack Haley on The Wonder Show. As he always said, he could believe in God and listen to the radio on his night of rest.

To be married to a kosher butcher who doesn't even want to attend Shabbat dinner, my mother would say and cluck her tongue, and then she would light our candles. She always lit the candles and we'd always say a quick prayer. But then she would smile and pull up a chair next to the radio and eat pea soup there with our father, and Susan and I would hear the two of them laughing from the bedroom in the back of the apartment.

But Ed grew up back in Russia, much more religious than I did here. He insisted on a formal Shabbat dinner every Friday night. We used to go to the one at his mother Lena's apartment, which was regularly attended by Ed's younger brother, Leo, Leo's wife, Betty, and their two daughters, but more recently I had told Ed that I would make the dinner for us. Back on Delancey Street my mother and Bubbe Kasha would walk up the steps to join us each week.

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.