The Hours Count (20 page)

“But it could come up at work . . .” I said, my voice trailing off as I noticed Ethel was frowning.

“You don’t know?” she said.

“Know what?”

“Ed hasn’t worked for Julie for weeks. He left Pitt with Bernie and Dave.”

I stared at her and opened my mouth to protest, but then didn’t know what to say. If Ed hadn’t been leaving to go to work for Julie every morning, then where was he going and why hadn’t he told me? Finally I managed to say, “Why didn’t you mention this before now?”

“I assumed you already knew. And, anyway, I didn’t want it to come between us,” Ethel said. “It has nothing to do with you and me, really, right . . . ?”

“Of course,” I said quickly. “Of course it has nothing to do with us.” Then I added, “Of course it won’t come between us.”

Ethel reached across the couch and squeezed my hand. “Of course it won’t,” she murmured. “Let the men be the men. And we’ll be as we always are.”

LATER
, as I waited for Ed to come home from wherever it was he was, I smoked a cigarette and looked at the words Nurse Ames had
scribbled on the paper. It was a man’s name and an address—in Brooklyn, I was fairly sure. The words seemed so innocent there on the paper, just scrawled out, not like something illegal, something that could kill me. I shivered at the thought.

David slept soundly on his mattress in the next room, and I went to the doorway and watched him. He was getting so big, and my heart folded with a love for him that felt larger, more all-consuming, than any other feeling I’d ever felt. What would happen to him should something happen to me? What would happen to him should I have another baby to care for?

The door opened and it startled me, and then I made my way back to the perfect blue couch. In the dark, only the glow of my cigarette illuminated the living room. “How was work?” I said to Ed as he walked into our apartment, a shadow.

He hung up his hat, turned on a light, and went straight for the kitchen, ignoring my question. I heard the vodka crackling over ice, and then he came and sat down at the opposite end of the couch from me and put his feet up on the coffee table. I took a slow drag on my cigarette and blew the smoke into the air in such a way that I could barely make out the features of his face. “How was work?” I asked again.

“Work was work.” He drained the glass of vodka and put it on the coffee table. I slipped a coaster underneath it and put my cigarette out in the ashtray.

“You’ve been lying to me,” I said quietly.

He laughed a little as if I’d startled him or amused him—I couldn’t tell. “And you’ve been lying to me,” he said with such certainty that I couldn’t breathe. What did he know? About the diaphragm? David’s therapy? The Catskills? Jake?

Before he could elaborate, I made a decision in an instant. It was self-preservation, not just for me but for David. “There’s going to be another baby,” I heard myself saying. I felt the scrap of paper in my palm and I crumpled it in my fist.

For a moment, the air was still, I could hear Ed breathing. And then he said, “You’ve been to the doctor?”

“Yes. Today.”

“Well, then, that is very good news.” He picked up his glass and walked back into the kitchen to refill it. I wanted to ask him more about what had happened at work, but if I asked him to explain his lies, then I worried he might ask me to explain mine.

I WASN
’
T SURE
where Ed went the next morning, when he left in a suit and tie as he always did. For that matter, I wasn’t sure where he’d been going for weeks. But I said nothing else to him about it, and I thought about how I might investigate on my own. I wondered if Ethel knew more than she’d let on yesterday. I intended to ask her.

Before he left, Ed brought me a piece of toast in bed and reminded me, his voice sounding unusually kind, to rest so what happened last time wouldn’t happen again.

“Rest?” I laughed, but I felt a bit of warmth for him that I hadn’t felt in so long. David was awake and had begun jumping on his mattress. His arms flailed high in the air, toward the ceiling. Someday, he would be tall enough to reach it, I thought.

“I am sending my mother over to help you today,” Ed said.

“That’s really not necessary.” I felt suddenly overwhelmed with dread at the thought of having to navigate my day with Lena
around. And today was a Thursday, a day David and I would walk to Waterman’s Grocery and look for Jake, though I wondered what I would say now if we found him. What he would say if I told him about the baby. But I didn’t care. It was a Thursday, and Jake might have returned and could be expecting us.

“I have already called her,” Ed said. “She will be here any minute.”

AS SOON AS ED LEFT
, I jumped out of bed, ignoring the dizziness and the nausea, and I ran for the telephone and dialed Lena’s number. It rang and it rang and I knew she’d already left, a realization soon confirmed by a knock at the door.

She looked smaller than I remembered her, standing out there in the hallway. I hadn’t seen her in months and, in that time, it seemed she had shrunk. Her hair was the color of dirty snow, and she had it pulled back into an imperfect bun, whisps of brown-white framing her face. “Hello,” I said. “Thank you for coming all the way over here. But it’s not necessary. I don’t want to be a burden.”

“Nonsense.” She pushed her way past me and walked into the apartment. She sniffed the air. “I smell dust. You haven’t been keeping this place clean, eh, Mildred?”

“I have.” I suddenly felt defensive, the way I always did around Lena—though, truthfully, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dusted.

Lena ran a fingertip across the coffee table, examined closely, and frowned. “You are supposed to rest in bed,” she said. “I will clean this place up, get things in order.” Lena pulled a duster off my shelf and began moving it across the coffee table.

I watched David, sitting by the window, playing with his communication cars. Lena hadn’t even noticed him when she’d walked in. Or at least she’d pretended not to. It was as if his silence made him invisible to her, transformed him from a little boy—her grandson—into something she wanted to ignore or even forget. He lined up the reds in rows. He was hungry. I hadn’t gotten him any breakfast yet.

“I am very glad my son called,” Lena said as she dusted. “I am worried about him now.”

“Why?” I asked, wondering if Lena knew something about Ed’s job that I didn’t.

Lena looked up from her dusting. “Why, Mildred? Everyone hates Russia now. Ed still sounds so Russian. People might get the wrong idea.”

Maybe Lena was right to be worried. “Has he talked to you about it?”

“Oh goodness no. He’s so strong. He carries it all inside him the way men do, you know. But a mother worries.” She looked pointedly at me as if I could never understand, as if David still not speaking meant that I did not worry enough, and I gave up on the conversation and walked back into my bedroom to get dressed.

I pulled a dress over my head and did up the buttons, realizing it was the same dress I’d worn that night in the Catskills, the dress Jake had unbuttoned so gently. Now I had to pull the fabric to stretch it across my swollen and tender chest. But I let my fingers linger across the buttons the way Jake’s had.

I heard David banging his cars against the floor, and I walked back into the living room, quickly buttoning up the rest of the buttons. Lena stood there, in front of him now, and yelled, “Bad boy.
You are such a bad, bad boy!” She ripped a red car from his hand, and he began to flail.

I ran over to her and pulled the car and the duster from her hands. “What are you doing?” I cried. David kicked the floor and started crying. I bent down and said, “Darling, I know, red. You’re hungry. Just give me a minute to talk to Nana, okay?” But David was gone, past the point of reasoning.

“Look,” I said to Lena, and it took all my strength not to reach over and grab her, to shake her and tell her how stupid I thought she was, how it was not all right for her to yell at David like that. I breathed in and out. “I appreciate your kindness.” I spoke as firmly as I could. “But I don’t need your help today. David and I will be fine on our own.”

She pulled the duster away from me. “My son asked me to come here while he was at work,” she said firmly. “I will stay until he comes home.”

“Fine.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest. But my breasts felt so tender and swollen that I had to loosen my defiant stance a little. I walked into the kitchen to grab some bread for David, and hopefully calm him down, but the refrigerator was empty. Ed must’ve given me the last slice this morning. Perfect.

I walked back into the living room, grabbed David’s hand, and pulled him up so quickly that I surprised him, and, for the moment, he stopped flailing. Maybe he could sense my anger, and it was something unexpected. “Darling, we don’t have any bread left,” I said carefully, wanting him to understand I wasn’t mad at him. “We’ll walk over to Waterman’s Grocery and get you some food.”

I wasn’t sure if David understood, if he could sense what I was really saying.
Waterman’s Grocery.
Jake.
That today was Thursday,
and Jake would have to return to the city eventually. But whether he understood or not, David stopped flailing and followed me to the door without a fight.

Lena walked over to the telephone. “I will call Ed at work,” she said, waving the heavy black receiver in the air as if a threat.

“Go ahead.” I was fairly positive that Lena didn’t know that Ed no longer worked at Pitt. That she, like me, had no idea where he was.

THE AIR HAD
turned cold suddenly. It had seemed just last week to still be summer and now it was as if we’d skipped fall altogether and had headed straight for winter, though it was only October. In my rush to get away from Lena, I’d left our coats behind, and David shivered. I pulled him closer to me.

We walked inside Waterman’s Grocery and went up to the counter, where I ordered David some toast, eggs, and milk. “Who’re you rooting for?” Mr. Waterman asked me as he put a plate of food in front of David.

“What do you mean?”

“The Dodgers or the Yankees?” I shook my head. “The World Series, Mrs. Stein. They’re one–one right now. I say the Dodgers are going to take it.”