People LIke Her(45)
Winter looks puzzled.
“Problem?”
The problem is the passwords, says Winter.
“You don’t remember them?”
She shakes her head.
“I always had them written down,” she says. “I wrote them all down, all the different passwords you gave me.”
“Wrote them all down where?” asks Emmy.
“On a Post-it note.”
“And where did you stick that Post-it note?”
Winter tells us.
“Jesus,” says Emmy.
“I’m really sorry,” says Winter.
There are times, I think, when sorry really doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Emmy
Every. Single. One.
Every single password was on that Post-it.
And so it wouldn’t get lost, she stuck the Post-it to the screen of the fucking laptop.
Which means that whoever stole it has had three days’ unrestricted access to everything Mamabare has ever done, all helpfully saved on my desktop or in the Cloud. Thousands and thousands of photos, emails, contracts. The task I’ve set Dan and Winter for this afternoon is to sit down and make a list of absolutely everything they could have got their hands on. Which is not just the stuff on the laptop itself, of course. It’s every picture I have on my phone or Dan has on his phone. Every DM Mamabare has received. Text messages. WhatsApp messages. Passport scans. The guest list for Coco’s party.
I literally don’t have time to deal with this shit today. I don’t even have time to think about it. I could have strangled Winter, I really could. If there’d been more time, I might have.
Of all the days.
In the back of the cab on the way to the shoot, I call Irene again. She promises me she’ll speak to Dan and Winter, take charge, give them instructions. She thinks for a minute. “Maybe I’d better go over there myself,” she says. There will be a lot of passwords to change, for one thing. There will be a lot of people to notify. She asks me how I’m feeling. She reminds me about today, how important it is. She’s sure they won’t mind that I am a little late, so long as I turn it on when we get there.
I tell her not to worry about that. One thing I learned very early, growing up in my family, was how to compartmentalize.
Anyway, Irene doesn’t have to remind me how lucky I am to be involved in this shoot. I will be—and believe me, this is more of a coup than it sounds—one of the faces of a major toilet paper brand’s #tothebottomwiperinchief Mother’s Day campaign.
It’s also something of a personal triumph for Irene.
She’s booked all five of the pod, plus our own mothers and children, for this one. It’s no accident that, as a group, we have a lot of bases covered, personality-wise, like a low-energy Spice Girls tribute act. There’s Hannah with her earth mother schtick, Bella and her empowerment, Sara’s small business owning, and Suzy’s vintage style. Our own mothers are even more of a mixed bag—only mine has wholeheartedly embraced the influencer thing.
Virginia has been texting me for about an hour now, wanting to know where I am.
Having always been pretty sniffy about my career in magazines—not to mention my choice of a novelist over a hedge-fund husband—once she realized what was in it for her, my mother was delighted by my segue into social media. Being an Instagram grande dame suits her down to the ground and, to be fair to her, she has proven herself to be a very useful Mamabare brand extension.
It’s been fascinating to see Ginny share her pearls of parenting wisdom on her own little squares (sandwiched in among an increasing number of paid-for #ads for wrinkle cream, hair dye to cover up the greys, and Windsmoor coats—although it is a personal bugbear of hers that only what she calls “old-lady labels” have been flash with the cash). Hearing her wax lyrical about all the nursery rhymes she used to sing me, all the cakes we baked together, all the fun we used to have almost makes me believe I had an idyllic childhood.
The photo from the family album of six-year-old me pointing at the gap where a front tooth should be with a lengthy caption about putting fifty pence and a handwritten poem under my pillow? I’m sure I’m not misremembering her, hungover, throwing a fiver in my face when I cried because the tooth fairy hadn’t visited. As for the heartfelt words she shared on December twenty-fifth, about how I believed in Father Christmas until I was thirteen because she always took a bite out of the carrot and left size-ten footprints in icing-sugar “snow” on the porch? My only memories from the festive season are of her necking Santa’s brandy, burning the Brussels sprouts, and accidentally showing off her red wine teeth when shushing me for the Queen’s speech.
I wish I could say she’s a better grandmother than she was a mother, but the photos of hugs and smiles and blowing out birthday cake candles with Coco are all for Instagram’s sake. My mother has always applied what Dr. Fairs calls the if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods approach to relationships. Even before she became an Instagran, it often felt like it was more important for her to get a photo of her and Coco to show her friends at bridge club than it was to actually spend time with Coco. She never calls to just ask how we are, never drops round unannounced to see her grandkids. If anything, she has provided me with a shining example of how not to let the optics interfere with real family life—not that I always get it right myself, by any stretch. But at least I try.