Nonna had strange legs, thick and stout with beige stockings that were always laddered on the calves. Hired as my nanny, she was an old Italian woman whose English was poor and rarely spoken. She followed me around the apartment, chastising me with a hand slap if I got too close to the fireplace or emptied her pocketbook over the floor. My parents worked at a financial firm downtown, leaving Nonna to be my surrogate. I was not allowed to leave the apartment by myself. Nonna, though, took me on walks to Central Park, pointing out the Obelisk and Belvedere Castle, often shaking her head at the stone folly. Once, on the subway, she brought me along to Little Italy. We walked through the cobbled streets to a pasticceria, where she fed me cannoli and gelato, and on the way out I vomited on her shoes.

The line outside the coffee shop was long, a mix of tourists looking for somewhere to sit and office workers on their lunch break. My watch showed thirty minutes before my meeting with the marketing department; I was presenting a new waterproof material, but back in Philadelphia I’d only read the brief—something about fabric density. As I waited, the smell of coffee reminded me of Nonna, who kept a battered moka pot in the family kitchen. Every morning, when she arrived at the apartment, she would carefully add water into the pot, place ground coffee into a metal filter and then fit it inside the pot. The moka would sit on the stove until a playful gurgling sound indicated it was ready. After a few minutes, she would slowly sip the espresso and stare at me without smiling.

I considered the Café Rizz a block over on 53rd. I nodded to the Asian family in matching I ♥ NY t-shirts behind me. They gave sympathetic looks in return, and I set off—double-checking my watch that I still had time. The walk was brisk, about five minutes, but the café had closed. A note in the window specified it had relocated four blocks away. I kept going, east towards the river. I hadn’t been in the city for years, and I found strange delight in the intricacy of the neighborhood: the bodega selling half-priced pantyhose, the closed shoe repair shop re-opening as a sunglasses store, and a construction site busy with the renovation of a tenement building.

The day before my 13th birthday Nonna made me a cake: a dense mixture flavored with sugar, lemon, and vanilla. I watched her maneuver around the kitchen, her thick legs lending a waddle to her movements. While it baked we took a walk looping past the castle, out of the park, and into Harlem, where she bought me a watch from a guy on the street. That night from my bedroom, I heard the raised voices of my parents. Later, I thought I could hear crying and the slamming of the front door. The next day Nonna didn’t come back—and no one came to replace her. Instead, after school, I read the family Bible and completed my homework in a regimented order: math, Latin, history.

At 59th I saw the tramway, the cabin dangling from loose black cables, slowly moving over to Roosevelt Island. At the station, I got in a near-empty cabin. To the right a young woman poured over a New York City map and checked off various landmarks: Times Square, Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building. Over her shoulder I could see glass block residential towers and below, the Queensborough Bridge, a dozen cars moving quickly across. Arriving at the other side, I walked along the path that bordered the river, pacing up and down several times. After a while I sat on a bench, facing lower Manhattan, the rain coming in from the south. The clouds were descending, obscuring the tip of the island. I took out a cigarette and smoked it until the rain put it out a few minutes later.