HE LOOKS LIKE ME

We were walking to a school interview and Nico was in a suit.

He hated the suit. He had told me so at the apartment, in the elevator, and again on the corner of 63rd, in that flat way eight-year-olds have of assuming that repetition is a form of argument.

The interview was at nine forty. It was a school with a waiting list and an admissions director who used the word *fit* eleven times on the phone, and I had spent four hundred dollars on a navy jacket for a child who grows an inch a season.

That is the woman I was that morning. I think it is important to write that down before anything else happens.

It was a grey day. Wet asphalt, no sun, the kind of March light that makes everything in this city look like it was filmed forty years ago. A taxi went by with its off-duty light on. Two men in dark coats came past us walking fast the way people walk on that block at that hour.

I had Nico's hand. I remember that because of what happened to it.

We were maybe thirty feet from the crossing when he stopped dead.

Not slowed. Stopped, with his whole weight, so that my arm went back before I did and my bag slid off my shoulder to my elbow.

He was looking right, toward the lamp post at the corner, and he was not blinking.

"Mom."

"We're late, sweetheart."

"Mom. That kid."

I did the thing every parent in this city does automatically, without cruelty and without thinking, four or five times a week.

I said, without looking, "Don't stare."

"He looks like me."

I looked.