Read Reinventing Mona for Free Online

school.” She slammed the phone down, and with that I knew that I would be attending whatever academy Grammy wanted me to.
    Grammy smiled tightly with her thin coral lips and asked if I’d like an omelet. “Okay,” I replied, almost frightened to decline. Patrice brought us two omelets with huge cubes of ham and potatoes and melted cheese resting on sprigs of charred rosemary on white china plates. I smiled as I picked up my gleaming silver fork.
    “What?” Grammy asked, not necessarily amused.
    “It’s just that this is the way she used to cook her eggs, too,” I told Grammy. “The ham and potatoes perfectly square, and the burnt rosemary.” I smiled. “Just without all of this other fancy stuff,” escaped.
    “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” she said sadly. “Laura hated all my fancy stuff.”
    “You look just like her,” I told Grammy.
    “I know. She hated that, too.”
    “No, she didn’t,” I quickly corrected. “She loved that she looked like you, she just didn’t like all of your…” I trailed off.
    “Fancy stuff,” Grammy finished.
    “No, um, plastic surgery,” I said awkwardly, and was hugely relieved when Grammy burst into laughter.
    “Laura and I were different people. That is indisputable,” Grammy said heavily. “Maybe she was right with her communist thinking. It’s not as though any of these things ever really bought me happiness.” She sighed. “I always felt as though I failed your mother. If I’d done a better job as a mother, she wouldn’t have run off to that crazy ranch.”
    “That’s so untrue,” I jumped in. “She didn’t run away from anything. They created their version of paradise. They used to talk about it at Berkeley all the time, and finally they all had the guts to quit their boring jobs and make the simple and fulfilling life they’d always dreamed of.” This description was almost verbatim from Asia’s evening grace. I continued with my own spin. “She couldn’t have done any of that if you hadn’t done your job well, Grammy. She said that all the time. That her mother had a lot of things to give her, but the best gift of all was the freedom to think for herself and live her own life.”
    “She said that?” Grammy gasped.
    I nodded emphatically. “All the time.” She said it once.
    “What else did s he say?” Grammy asked. “Tell me everything, Mona. I feel as though we were truly strangers these past few years. Tell me about her. Anything you can think of, even if it seems inconsequential.”
    “Um, okay,” I replied. “What does inconsequential mean?”
    “Do you like driving, Mona?” Grammy asked. I shook my head. “After breakfast, I’m going to show you around San Diego. We’ll start on the island. I’ll show you your new school, then we’ll head up the coast for the afternoon, and you’ll tell me all about Laura. Even the little things that don’t seem important. That’s what inconsequential means: of no consequence.”
    We did so much driving that day that when we returned home, my ten-day-old braids degenerated into something frighteningly similar to dread locks. I looked at my image in Grammy’s gold mirror and began to cry at the sight of myself. I frantically rummaged through the bathroom drawers until I found a pack of loose razor blades. I sliced each braid from my head and watched them fall to the ground like thin sardines wrapped in colored fishing wire.

Chapter 6
    “Please stop apologizing already,” I told Greta. “I know what you meant. You’re so used to working with lunatics, you expect everyone to go off the deep end over the slightest thing.”
    Relieved by the reprieve, she laughed. “Mona, I work with people saner than you. My clients mostly tell me that after ten years of marriage they don’t know who their husbands are anymore—not that they didn’t know them before the wedding. I think your time would be wiser spent discovering who you are rather than trying to land a husband you can’t possibly