The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor Read Free Book Online

again.
    “Why don’t you just sign the silly oath?” I repeated to him. “Wouldn’t that be so much easier than finding another job?”
    Ed reached up and touched my cheek. His head moved in close to my face, close enough so I could feel his breath on my neck, and it was hot and smelled of vodka. “There is more to this than an oath, Mildred.” He kissed my cheek softly, and his finger strummed across the top of my collarbone, down my chest, across my stomach, until it stopped there. “But don’t worry yourself. I will figure everything out. You should only concern yourself with staying strong and healthy and growing us another child,” he said.

6

    A few weeks went by and the smallpox epidemic passed, David and I still remarkably alive, no worse for the wear, David still remarkably silent.
    On a sunny day two weeks after I’d seen Ethel, David and I walked to Mr. Bergman’s to pick up an extra brisket, and then when we got back off the elevator on the eleventh floor we walked down to the end of the hallway and I knocked on the door to G.E. 11.
    After a few moments, Ethel opened the door. She looked exhausted. Her body seemed entirely the breadth of the baby, and her face peaked and wrinkled in an almost unnatural way. “I brought you this.” I held out the brown-paper-wrapped brisket, my excuse for stopping by.
    “Oh, Millie,” she said. “How thoughtful of you.” She took the package from me, hesitated, and then asked if we’d like to come in, which was what I’d hoped for. The brisket was not so much thoughtful as it was selfish. These past weeks had stretched out, one lonely, quiet day after another, interrupted only by short, silentwalks to the playground, where the other mothers had stared at me and David without inviting us into their conversations.
    Ethel’s apartment was dimly lit, the shades still drawn though it was midmorning, and toys were scattered all about the floor. I scanned the room for John and soon found him in the corner by the window, where he appeared to be . . . setting an envelope on fire.
    “Ethel!” I pointed toward John and pulled David back behind me instinctively. Ethel sighed in a way that told me that this was not entirely surprising to her and then walked heavily—the weight of a the baby pulling her so far down now—to scold John about the matches. She appeared ready to give birth any moment, and it seemed John was not at all ready for what was to come.
    “This was so kind of you to bring me a brisket,” Ethel said, waddling back toward me, matches and half-burned envelope in hand. She put them down on the console table and took the brisket and placed it in her refrigerator. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.
    “If it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
    “Not at all.” I wasn’t sure I believed her, but she was already pouring the water, so I let her go ahead.
    David sat on the floor with John, watching with his mouth open while John tossed his blocks around carelessly and then laughed. Ethel ignored him, and I hoped David wouldn’t get any bad ideas. But it was so nice to be in someone else’s company that, for the moment, I didn’t even care.
    “You know Julie might have a job for Ed,” Ethel said nonchalantly as she handed me the coffee, as if this were a conversation we were in the middle of, not one we were just beginning after not seeing each other for weeks. I had yet to meet Julie, but a picture ofhim and Ethel, looking happy in their bathing suits, sat on top of the piano. They fit each other, I thought, simply from the way he had a sweetly protective arm around her shoulders, which looked altogether different than how Ed had ever had an arm around me. “He’s had trouble, too,” Ethel said, and shrugged. “He knows what it’s like. That’s why he started his own business.”
    “Julie is from Russia, too?” I asked.
    Ethel laughed and I smiled at her, until I realized maybe she was laughing at me. Ed had said he’d