“Was what worth it?” she asked.
“The years off Theo’s life.”
“You can’t blame me for blocked arteries,” she said.
“All the hostility, then. Why bother?”
That was a good question, although she didn’t admit it to Jack.
On her first day as the new company owner, she climbed the stairs to her father’s office, and Jack’s question kept coming back to her: why had she bothered? She’d alienated her family and was about to take over a business she had no idea how to run. She looked down over the factory works, and then she pulled the blind on the office door and locked it, and sat behind the desk and cried. When she ran out of tears, she wiped her face with a tissue and made a list of the people she had to talk to: the various factory foremen, the sales team, the accounting firm. After that, she opened the books and began her study of how to run a brick factory.
Six months later, Jack went missing. At first it was assumed he had gone somewhere to be alone—a cabin in the mountains, perhaps—but when a month went by and no one had heard from him, the family had to believe the worst. Estella was beside herself, but there was nothing she could do other than phone Rose, which she did every day until Rose asked her to stop. Andrew travelled to Calgary so many times to help with the search that he and Harmony finally decided to sell their house and move. Two of their children were already there anyway, one of them married. Andrew sent regular updates but there was never any real news. Jack had simply disappeared.
In the year that followed, a mass exodus of Diamonds occurred. Theo and Gladys were the next to move to Calgary, and before the year was out all four of Estella’s brothers had abandoned her, one way or another. It didn’t take long for their families to follow, lured by opportunities in the oil industry and the Diamond family inclination to stick together. The first Christmas that everyone was gone, Estella received an invitation from Mathew and Fay, but when she got there, she wished she had stayed home. She was a fly in the ointment, she thought, even though her sisters-in-law—all but Gladys—tried to pretend nothing had changed.
And there was no Jack.
It was the last time she travelled to Calgary, and the last time she shared a dinner table with her brothers.
ESTELLA’S LIFE BECAME the brick plant. She kept the company running well beyond Jack’s prediction concerning the obsolescence of bricks, partly by introducing a new brick veneer that sold well for a time. Eventually, cheap products from China did spell the end of Diamond bricks, but by then Estella was in her seventies and ready to retire.
When she made the decision to close down the plant, there was no sentimental backlash because there was no one left who cared about Oliver’s legacy. Her brothers had all died, and the only Diamond in the city was her great-niece Lydia. Estella had a hard time thinking of her with any magnanimity because she was just like her father, Paul, the nephew who had wrapped her car around a tree.
For fifteen years after the plant closed, Estella would sometimes drive out to the property and wander around the deserted buildings, which looked for some time as though the workers had just walked away. There were overalls hanging on hooks, a pair of dusty steel-toed boots inside the main entrance, even a black lunch box left open on a work counter. At first there were unsold bricks stacked in the storage sheds: a few pallets of the original yellow Diamond face bricks, more of the industrial firebrick they’d produced since the war years, a few remaining stacks of the brick veneer that had been Estella’s last attempt at keeping her product in the marketplace. Eventually, the leftovers from ninety years of production disappeared as people raided the storage sheds for souvenirs or for free DIY materials. Every year, another kiln fell into disrepair and more shingles blew off the sagging factory roof. There were pigeons and barn swallows living in the rafters, and once Estella scared off a coyote that had come inside to hunt mice. The day she arrived and saw that the wooden staircase to the office had fallen in was the last day she visited the plant. Although she had been mostly pragmatic about the demise of the factory, it was agonizing to see her father’s glass aerie suspended and inaccessible above her head. She made the decision to have the plant demolished to avoid a kiln or a roof collapsing on some unfortunate trespasser.
On the day of the demolition, Estella sat alone in her back garden with a snifter of brandy even though it was only noon, knowing that all traces of the family business would be gone by the end of the day. She had given the order to bulldoze even the Diamond and Sons sign, which she had never replaced. She had an offer on the land from a farm equipment manufacturer and she was planning to accept it. As she imagined the destruction—dry timber splintering, bricks tumbling as bulldozers knocked the kilns apart, clay dust rising like smoke from a fire—one of Jack’s old questions came back to her: Had it been worth it?
She considered it. She had run the plant well, and in the end that had been her vindication. But there was a caveat. When she was a child, she’d thought of her life as before the teapot or after the teapot, but now she realized her life was before and after Oliver’s death. Before was the Diamond family. After was the fight with her brothers. After was the Diamonds fleeing en masse to Alberta. After was her drinking alone on the last day of the existence of Oliver’s factory, with no one else to even raise a glass with her.
Then she began to feel sad, about the plant, about Jack, about everything, and she decided she was too old to be drinking brandy in the middle of the day. It had not been a good idea.
When she heard the phone ringing in the house, she rose to answer it in case it was the contractor she had hired for the demolition. She impulsively threw her empty glass into the garden, where it smashed on a paving stone. She’d heard they threw dishes at Greek weddings, although what this had to do with a Greek wedding she didn’t know.
It probably hadn’t been worth it, she thought, but it was years too late for regret. And there was no one to admit regret to, so what was the point?
When she got to the phone it had stopped ringing.
Her call display was lit up with an Alberta number.
3
The Other Diamonds
Estella’s decision to hire a housekeeper for the first time in her life was a pre-emptive move to keep herself out of the home care system. She found a woman named Emyflor Santos who had come alone to Canada from the Philippines to earn money for her children’s education. Emyflor worked full-time as a care aide in a seniors’ residence, and she lived in an apartment with three other Filipinas. She was always looking for more hours and she agreed to work for Estella three half-days a week. She was trying to get permanent residence status so she could send for her family, she told Estella. She hadn’t seen her kids in eight years except on FaceTime or WhatsApp. They had just begun school when she’d left and now they were teenagers. She had to explain to Estella what FaceTime and WhatsApp were.
Estella was happy to hear the Internet was good for something other than online dating, which was her great-niece Lydia’s new way of finding boyfriends. Maybe even a husband, she said, but she was being fussy this time. How fussy could you be, Estella wondered, when you advertised on the Internet? She had not thought it funny when Lydia threatened to set up what she called a “profile” for her. It was the same kind of teasing as Auntie’s got a boyfriend, and she had been happy to hear the end of that as her nieces outgrew it.
The threat of home care had reared its head after an unfortunate mishap in the grocery store, when Estella had fainted in a slow cashier’s lineup with a heavy bag of navel oranges and several cans of soup in her basket. It had been a hot day and the store’s air conditioning wasn’t working, and she’d begun to feel light-headed. She was attempting to gauge whether backwards or forwards was the better way to escape the lineup and make a break for fresh air when the heat got the better of her, and the weight of the basket pulled it right out of her hand so that it landed on the foot of the young man in line behind her. She remembered that he said, Ouch! Watch it, lady!
as though she’d dropped the basket on purpose, aimed it right at his oversized white sneaker, and she thought, How rude. Then she too landed at his feet, and he redeemed himself by calling an ambulance on his cellular phone when he realized what was happening.
By the time the EMTs arrived, Estella was sitting in a chair someone had found for her. She hated that everyone in line was staring at her. A few of the cashiers knew her and they were fussing, flapping store flyers in her face and asking each other if anyone knew how to use a defibrillator. Estella was relieved when she saw the ambulance pull up, thinking the EMTs might be saving her from death by defibrillator rather than a heart attack.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Estella tried telling them. “I feel much better. It was a just a spell. Have you not noticed the heat in here?”
“How about you let us decide,” said a young female EMT who looked as though she didn’t take guff. “Let’s just slide you over onto the royal litter here and we’ll run you to the hospital, just to be sure.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Estella said, but she moved onto the stretcher all the same and let the woman lift her feet as she lay back, because her head still felt light, and she wasn’t sure her legs would get her home.
“No patronizing, gotcha,” the woman said as she expertly tucked a flannel sheet around Estella, and then they were off, through the automatic doors and into a blast of even warmer air.
“You do know it’s a hot day,” Estella said, freeing her arms from under the sheet.
“Ah, but the gold carriage is air conditioned.”
“You find me amusing, do you?” Estella said as she was jacked up and zoomed into the back of the ambulance.
“Sure, why not?” the woman said, climbing in after her.
Her partner drove them out of the parking lot. No siren, Estella noted. So she wasn’t dying, then. The EMT tried to unbutton her blouse to attach a portable ECG machine but Estella slapped her hands away.
“I’m not amusing,” she said. “I’m difficult. And I don’t want to go to the hospital. Just drop me at home. It’s on the way.”
“Jeez Louise,” the EMT said. “We’re not a taxi service. You’re going to the hospital, even if it means the world will be blessed with your presence for another twenty years.”
Estella didn’t argue any further because she didn’t actually want to drop dead alone in her house.
They kept her at the hospital for several hours hooked up to a heart monitor, and they half drained her blood supply before deciding there wasn’t much wrong with her, at least nothing that was going to kill her tomorrow. In the end, they decided to send her home with an order to stay hydrated on hot days, and a requisition for a home care assessment.
Estella was furious when she saw that.
“I have all the help I need,” she said to the nurse who was discharging her. “I have a niece, great-niece, to be exact.”
“Will she be picking you up, then?” the nurse asked, looking at Estella over her reading glasses, her clipboard on her lap.
Estella was reluctant to call Lydia but she didn’t know how else she would get home.
The nurse was still looking at her, waiting for an answer.
“Tell me the number,” she said. “I’ll dial for you.”
Estella gave her Lydia’s work number, and the nurse punched it in and handed her the receiver. She braced herself, because you could never count on Lydia. She was too much her father’s daughter. She’d gotten married right out of high school to a junior hockey coach and the marriage had lasted less than a year. When it ended, Lydia was pregnant and the hockey coach was claiming the baby wasn’t his and refusing to pay child support. Paul and his wife had by this time left the city, having moved to Fort McMurray, so Estella stepped in and rented Lydia an apartment, and then got her through a bookkeeping course at the technical school after the baby was born, a daughter she named Mercy. Lydia raised Mercy mostly as a single parent with a couple more husbands making brief appearances, and then Mercy grew up and went away, and a year ago she’d returned with her seven-year-old autistic son, Lonny. Lydia, to her credit, took them in.
The nurse handed Estella the phone when Lydia answered, and she tried to explain succinctly why she was calling. She was at the hospital—not to worry, she was fine, but she needed someone to pick her up.
“You want me to come and get you?” Lydia said. “Now?”
“Yes,” Estella said. “If you don’t mind.”
“And you’re all right?” Lydia asked. “You’re not sick or anything?”
No, Estella assured her, she was not sick.
“Then I think you should call a taxi,” Lydia said. “I’m at work. I can’t just leave, can I.”
Actually, she could, Estella thought. She was always talking about how her boss was hardly ever there, and it sounded as though she spent half her workday in the downtown mall.
“Never mind, then,” Estella said, and she handed the phone back to the nurse.
“She’s at work,” Estella told the nurse. “She can’t leave.”
“And there’s no one else? No other relatives?”
“My misfortune to have outlived them all,” Estella said.
At that moment the young doctor who had declared her well enough to go home came in to sign her release form.
“Healthy as a horse,” he said as he scrawled his signature.
“Is that why you think I need Meals on Wheels or some such nonsense?” she fired back at him.
“And smart as a whip, apparently,” he said, which Estella knew was no longer true. The brain wore out with use, in spite of what they told you about keeping it exercised.
The doctor put down his pen and said, “Look. You’re over ninety years old. You still live in your own home. You’ve earned a bit of help now and then.” He turned to the nurse and said, “Send that requisition to home care, yeah?”
“I don’t want it,” Estella said.
“Do you want to go home?” the doctor asked her.
“Of course I do. Is that a threat?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s my responsibility to see that you go home safely so you’re not back here in an ambulance again tomorrow.”
And then he left.
“Don’t you dare send that in,” Estella said to the nurse.
“It’s a condition of your release,” the nurse said, and Estella wanted to shoot someone.
The nurse called her a taxi and she went home, thinking that if anyone showed up at her door with anaemic-looking roast beef and instant mashed potatoes on a paper plate, she would show them how able she was with a kick to the shins.
Even though she was annoyed with Lydia, she phoned her anyway that evening because she thought she might need her for backup when the home care people came calling. She told her what had happened, and Lydia somehow got it into her head that Estella must have had a mild heart attack, in spite of the ER doctor’s diagnosis.
“I don’t believe there’s any such thing,” Estella said. “That’s like being a little bit dead.”
There was a familiar silence on the end of the line.
“You’re on that Internet, aren’t you, looking this up.”
“It says you can have a mild heart attack without any symptoms. It can still kill you.”
“I’d hardly call it mild, then. Anyway, forget whatever you’re looking at. I was hooked up to every machine in the place and they found nothing.”
Then she told Lydia the reason for her call: that she might need her support on the home care issue—to lie, that is, and say she helped Estella with the house—but Lydia was by now on the Mayo Clinic site, which she said was 100 percent reliable. Estella ended the call in frustration, hoping that the request for backup had registered.
Two weeks after the hospital visit, the home care assessor showed up. When Estella saw a strange woman with a briefcase ringing her doorbell, she almost didn’t answer, thinking she might be a Jehovah’s Witness, but then she reme
mbered they always come in twos, so she opened the door.
“Hello,” the woman said. “Estella? I’m Nancy Segal, from home care. I’ve been asked to do an assessment, just routine, to see if you’re managing okay in your own home.”
“And how does that seem so far?” Estella asked.
Nancy Segal didn’t skip a beat and said, “Good, so far. But do you mind if I ask a few questions? It won’t take long.”
Estella noticed that one sneakered foot was moving slowly toward the open door, as though the woman was going to stick it inside and stop Estella from shutting her out.
“Oh, all right then, if it will keep you people from bothering me,” Estella said. “But I don’t need help, and you can put that in your notebook.”
She took the woman to the sitting room and didn’t offer her anything. She wanted to get this over with.
“You have a lovely old home,” the woman said.
Estella could just see her calculating how much work it would be to keep up. She hoped the woman wouldn’t see the layer of dust on everything, and Estella wished she’d been given notice so she could have put the house in order.
“And you do your own cooking, then?” the woman asked.
“Of course. I’m a good cook. Always have been.” Which wasn’t true. She’d never much liked cooking, but she knew how to fill her belly with all the food groups.
The woman was looking at a form she’d pulled out of her briefcase. “And I see here that you have a niece in the city who helps you out?”
“Yes. She checks on me every day.” Another lie, but a convenient one at the moment.
“And your laundry?”
“I do it myself. I like ironing. It’s therapeutic. Have you read The Edible Woman?”
Nancy shook her head without looking up. “I don’t have much time to read,” she said, concentrating on her check boxes.
“Well, that’s sad, isn’t it,” Estella said. “Maybe you need some extra help.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your sense of humour, is there?”
The Diamond House Page 23