Reinventing Mona by Jennifer Coburn

attend dinner at her parents’ house. Inspired by Mike’s assurance that I had babe potential, I decided to run on the beach before showering and changing for Greta’s. Rather than run along the cement walkway, though, I decided to climb over the wall of rocks and run barefoot along the shoreline.
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    My first Christmas with Grammy was spent dining in a hotel restaurant and window-shopping at closed stores, making us acutely aware that our family portrait was composed by tragedy. Something about getting away from home helped us escape the reality of looking at each other from opposite ends of an enormous dining room table. Grammy could’ve easily filled the seats with a dozen of her friends; it just seemed easier on both of us if we got out of the house. I suppose it was because the accident happened right around this time of year. We never really talked about it. It was always just assumed that Christmas would be spent anywhere but home. Each year our celebrations were further from home until our last trip.
    There were years we stumbled onto very familial Christmas dinners. While I was on semester break from UCSD, Grammy and I stayed at a bed-and breakfast about two hours outside of Dublin. It was possibly the coziest, warmest place on earth I’d ever visited. The Hennigan family ran the bed-and-breakfast, and Grammy and I were their only guests that week. They were a retired couple with five grown children who all lived within a three-mile radius with families of their own. The Hennigans’ walls were cluttered with framed photos and souvenir plates from places they’d traveled. A pewter mug with their family crest shared shelf space with a stuffed teddy bear wearing a knit sweater from a local preparatory school. A half-finished game of Scrabble sat on a table where a silverware box was resting, waiting to be polished.
    Grammy and I were like cats on a fishing dock, slightly tipsy and cuddled together under one of the many handmade quilts strewn across the Hennigan home. A fire blazed and people continued drinking, exchanging stories of the worst winters that ever hit Ireland.
    Grammy and I also spent Christmas holidays in Jerusalem, Australia, Thailand, Athens, Rome, Barbados, and New York. Our New York trip was our last Christmas together. We were very much the tourists venturing through Central Park in a horse drawn carriage, taking in two Broadway shows and even going to the top of the red-and-green lit Empire State Building observation deck. I thought of how many couples planned to rendezvous there since An Affair to Remember, one of the only classic films I actually hated. I could never understand why Deborah Kerr didn’t just show up in her wheelchair to meet Cary Grant. Grammy said I couldn’t understand what a stigma it was to have a disability back then. She said it wasn’t like these days when people in wheelchairs are in Kmart commercials. Still, if I were madly, passionately in love, I’d hope that my Cary Grant would adore me no matter what. I would crawl up every last stair of the then-ADA noncompliant observation deck, panting and sweating, declaring, “I cannot walk, my darling, but I can still love. I can love you until I draw my last breath of life,” or something equally dramatic. The kind of crazy talk you can only get away with in old movies.
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    Not only could I walk, I was able to run, and decided I’d better get to it if I was serious about losing that ten pounds Mike suggested. As my feet hit the wet sand, I noticed the imprint darken, then quickly fade. I thought about last Christmas and the one night I spent off the pages of the New York tour book—the first time I crawled out of my own life and into someone else’s. Grammy said she wanted an evening to herself so I walked all the way from The Plaza down to Greenwich Village. I planned to hail a cab, but was distracted by the street vendors. I bought a blue fuzzy Kangol beret and scarf, which the Pakistani merchant said