“No, thank you,” she hears her mother say, and she turns to look with alarm from the Asian man to the person her mother is addressing in a tone of voice that seems to Isabelle bordering on rude. A man has stepped into their path and opened a briefcase of knockoff Rolex watches; her mother drops Isabelle’s hand and instead grips her shoulder, steering them both away from the man and then around the corner onto a side street.

“I can’t stand Lex, sometimes,” her mother says, slowing her pace as they make their way west on a street tranquil by comparison to the avenue they have left behind. “Too much for Maggie to smell, too.” She takes Isabelle’s hand again. Isabelle glances backward over her shoulder, disappointed by the turn they have taken. The smell of a vendor’s honey-roasted nuts wafts after them like a tease. Isabelle breathes it in greedily, searching for the smell with every breath until she is sure that it is gone. There are no vendors on Park or Madison, she thinks, no crowds like the one they have left behind—but then as her mother takes the right turn up Park Avenue, Isabelle’s resistance gives. Park offers its own spectacles. She studies the molding and stonework of each building they pass, her head tilted back so that she can look as high as the topmost story where the stonework and carvings are the most elaborate. She compares the awnings of the buildings—some are green and some are gray, some have a ridged border and others are straight across, and they are all shaped differently, too, whether arched or square. Gray and arched, she thinks; gray and arched makes for the best-looking canopy.

She lets out a contented breath and looks down at the sidewalk passing beneath her feet. This particular sidewalk is the city’s standard sidewalk—a gray-white ribbon of concrete with scoring every four feet or so—and comfortingly familiar. But there are other types of sidewalk, too, Isabelle thinks. There are those hexagonal pavers on the park side of Fifth, and the redbrick sidewalk outside the Met, and her favorite, the rose-colored marble slabs around the Cooper-Hewitt, smooth enough to slide on when it rains. And on leafy side streets like their own street, the concrete is broken, ruptured by tree roots, and sometimes, just sometimes, you come upon a textured sidewalk inlaid with shells. Maybe these are actually her favorite, she thinks; she likes to imagine from what beach the shells might have come.

She feels her mother squeeze her hand. “Let’s cross here,” her mother says. Isabelle looks up at the street sign; already they are almost home. She steps off the curb after her mother, pulling her hand free to run it through Maggie’s fur before putting it in her pocket to warm it for a while. She steps only on the white rungs of the crosswalk painted on the asphalt and then, when they are once again on the sidewalk, she allows each foot to fall only and exactly once inside each square of the concrete, and she counts the squares as they go—twelve, thirteen, fourteen—and then, with a start, she looks up. A large bus has pulled up along the curb just ahead of them, and through the cracked windows Isabelle can hear the voices of girls calling, Maggie! Maggie! She stops dead; her mother keeps walking for several yards before she realizes that Isabelle is not following her.