“Is there a box for that?”
“I can make a note of it,” Nancy said.
Then she got out her “little memory test” as she called it, and began asking questions.
What year were you born?
Do you know your address and phone number?
Who’s the prime minister of Canada?
Estella answered them all without hesitation. If the woman had asked her what she’d done yesterday she’d have been in trouble, but that question was not on the list. Only one of Nancy’s questions gave her pause.
Do you feel safe in your home?
Did she?
Not when she heard voices in the night she didn’t. Not when she woke up and couldn’t remember where she was. It was terrifying. But she couldn’t admit that or she’d never get rid of this woman.
“Yes,” Estella said. “Of course. I’ve lived in this house my entire life.”
“Well, that’s all very good,” Nancy said.
Estella saw her eyes lingering on the dining table, the breakfast dishes still there, and the ones from the night before. She sometimes saved them up. It was more efficient.
“Do you mind if I have a look at your bathroom?” Nancy asked. “Just to see if it’s safe for you. Is it on the second floor?” She was already rising and heading for the staircase, and Estella didn’t see how she could stop her without grabbing her. How, she wondered, did this nosy woman have the nerve to wander so freely in someone else’s house? She wanted to ask her to leave, but she was afraid of the power she might have. She followed her up the stairs, wondering when she had last cleaned the bathtub. She knew it wasn’t recently.
The bathroom was not in good shape. There were dirty towels piled on the floor, waiting for a laundry day. The washing machine was in the basement and Estella didn’t like the basement stairs, so laundry days were less frequent than they used to be. The tub needed a good scrubbing, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last mopped the tiles. She thought of her mother and what she would have to say about the state of the house.
“You could use some grab bars in here,” Nancy said, ignoring the obvious, which was that Estella needed help with the housework. “Everyone should have them.”
She was being polite, Estella thought, focusing on her safety rather than the soap scum in the sink. She felt defeated by this woman, because she realized she was right. Estella was now that old woman, the one who lived in a dirty house and walked around with tomato stains on her blouse. She wondered if there was any point hoping that Lydia might offer to help out a little more if she knew about Nancy and her forms, the threat of strangers in Estella’s business. She hated to risk annoying Lydia. Without her, she’d have no one.
When they got downstairs again Nancy said, “You did fine on the memory test, Estella, and you seem to get around the house without trouble. Wonderful for your age. Such a big house, though, isn’t it? I’d like to recommend a bit of help with the upkeep. We do only light housekeeping—no oven cleaning or window washing—just the daily upkeep. It’s subsidized, so very affordable. Can I put that through?”
“Go ahead, then,” Estella said, “if you must.” She pictured a stranger with a bucket full of cleaning supplies. “I’ll need resumés and references, of course.”
“Resumés?” Nancy said.
“The cleaners,” she said. “I’m not having just anyone in my house.”
Then Nancy had to explain the way it worked, that the housekeepers were approved by home care, not the clients, and it might not be the same person every time. Home care would manage the schedule.
“No,” Estella said, shaking her head. “Absolutely not.”
“Excuse me?”
“I won’t have it. I’d rather live in a sty. Anyway, I’m tired. You’ll have to leave now.”
She showed Nancy the door, and Nancy did leave, promising to be in touch, as though this was all in a day’s work and Estella had not objected at all to her offer of help.
A few hours later, once Estella had gotten over the immediate problem of Nancy and her forms and checklists, she walked the three blocks to the grocery store with her wheeled shopping bag, hoping there wouldn’t be a repeat mishap in the cashier’s line or she’d end up locked away in a nursing home. When she got inside, though, the air was cool and she felt fine. She stopped to glance at the community bulletin board and her eyes landed on one ad in particular. She read it over several times, wondering if it might provide an answer to her home care predicament: Reliable housekeeper/companion for seniors. References provided.
“Ha,” she said out loud, and she ripped off one of the paper tags with the phone number and stuck it in her purse. When she got home, she placed the call, and that was how she found Emyflor. She wondered why she had not thought of hiring a housekeeper sooner, although it was not lost on her that, after caring for everyone in the family, here she was having to hire her own help.
Still, it was a solution, and she liked Emyflor the instant she met her. She wore her black hair pulled back in a ponytail and she always seemed to be cheerful, even though her family was so far away. She spoke with an accent, and she told Estella that her first language was Tagalog, a language Estella had never heard of. She wore a little gold cross around her neck, which Estella took as an indication that she was Catholic.
Emyflor called her “Miss Estella.”
“You don’t have to call me that,” Estella said. It reminded her of a matriarch in the Deep South—either that or the family spinster. “Just plain Estella will do. We’ve never been much for formality in this house.”
Emyflor said, “But you have to be Miss Estella. All my ladies are Miss.” She said it as though it were a fact, something you couldn’t argue with, like the sky being blue or the grass green.
“Even the married ones?” Estella asked.
“Of course,” Emyflor said.
“Oh well then,” Estella said.
Lydia didn’t like the fact that Estella was paying good money to a stranger, but she let it go when she realized it meant the demands on her were less. Lydia even asked Emyflor once if she would come and clean for her every few weeks. Emyflor said no, she was a caregiver and she worked only for seniors.
Estella enjoyed it immensely that Emyflor had said no to Lydia. She felt that she had earned Emyflor’s company by having done her own share as a caregiver.
And by living so long. That too.
IT WAS ON one of Emyflor’s days—a Wednesday, and two days before the annual trip to Lake Claire—that the Nicholas Diamonds came from Calgary. Estella’s two-week lake vacation had shrunk down to a long weekend, and she thought it had all gotten a bit pitiful: just the four of them—herself, Lydia, Mercy, and Lonny—for three days in a cottage with sixty-year-old beds that needed to be replaced. They were like a Ringling Brothers Circus on its last legs, she thought: one remaining old elephant and a few straggling performers who were short on talent. Still, she was grateful that Lydia was willing to take her, especially after the year before, when Estella had behaved like her father and reacted badly to a misunderstanding. She could not deny that she was getting to be a fair amount of trouble.
When the doorbell rang, Emyflor hollered that she would get it, but she was upstairs so Estella got there before her. When she saw the man on her porch, she almost had a heart attack, and not a mild one, because she thought at first it was her youngest brother back from the dead. The man said his name was Nicholas Diamond, but still she had to grab onto the doorjamb to steady herself, she was thrown for such a loop. He was the spit of Jack.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said, gathering her wits again. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
Her mind was working to place him—could he be one of Jack’s sons?—but she quickly reasoned that he was too young, and anyway, she had known Jack’s two sons as children, Ryan and Don. Jack’s grandson, then, which he confirmed when he said Ryan Diamond was his father. She remembered that
Ryan was the one who had walked out on his family when the children were young.
“Is your mother Dora?” she asked. The name had come easily. She’d got lucky, or perhaps he had. If he’d arrived an hour sooner or later, it might have been another story. Her mind was like that now. It worked just fine, and then it didn’t.
“That’s right,” he said. “She raised us on her own after our father left.” Nicholas Diamond then explained that he was on his way from Calgary to Winnipeg with his wife and two girls, and since they were making good time they’d decided to stop on the off chance that she might be home. He apologized for not calling ahead.
Estella looked and saw a new car parked at the curb across the street, a silver sedan.
“Get your family,” she said. “Come in. Don’t just stand on the porch.”
In forty years, this had never happened.
Nicholas beckoned to his wife and daughters in the car. Estella could see the wife was hesitating, but then one of the girls got out of the car and began to cross the street toward them. She was carrying a shimmery little red purse on a silver chain over her shoulder. A dog trailing a leash jumped out of the car after her—a hound of some kind, a beagle, perhaps—and followed her across the street. The girl was soon standing beside her father while the dog did its business on Estella’s lawn. Estella noticed that the purse was covered in sequins.
“My oldest daughter, Hannah,” Nicholas said.
Then Nicholas’s wife and the younger daughter got out of the car. His wife did not look especially happy but Estella could see her composing her face as she walked toward them holding the younger girl’s hand, and by the time she arrived on the step to join her husband she looked the very picture of pleasant.
“Hello. I’m Marie,” she said. She introduced the younger girl, who appeared to be seven or eight years old, as Paris. Estella thought, Who names a child after a city? She was introduced to the younger girl as Miss Diamond. It reminded her of being a teacher.
“Call me Auntie,” Estella said quickly. “I haven’t been Miss Diamond for many years now.”
Nicholas looked confused and said, “You were married?”
“Heavens, no,” Estella said. “I taught school. I was Miss Diamond to the students.”
He apologized, as though mentioning marriage to a single old lady was the same degree of inappropriate as asking her age, and Estella thought, People never stop seeing a single woman as unfortunate, no matter how old she is. In Nicholas’s discomfort, he had a boyish look, which somehow made him appear a bit lost, and in that moment he looked exactly like Jack. She wanted to reach out and touch him.
She urged them all to come inside. Before they did, Marie took a plastic bag out of her purse and handed it to the older girl, who sighed but then picked up the dog’s mess.
“What should I do with it?” she asked.
Estella didn’t know. She surely didn’t want it in her kitchen garbage can.
“Is there a trash bin in the back?” Nicholas asked, and Estella said there was, and pointed to the path alongside the house. Nicholas took the plastic bag from his daughter and walked around the house. The dog followed him, still trailing its leash, while Estella showed the others to the sitting room.
Emyflor came downstairs shortly after that, and when Estella introduced the company, she said she would make lunch for everyone. Marie looked at her watch and said, “We don’t want to be any trouble,” but Estella waved off Marie’s concern and Emyflor went to the kitchen. Marie made polite conversation—lovely home, such an interesting porch the way it curved around the front of the house, and such a pretty part of town. Estella kept looking at the door, waiting for Jack/Nicholas to come in. The dog was barking at something in the backyard. The older girl, Hannah, took her phone out of her red purse, and her mother shook her head at her.
“You know the rule about phones,” Marie said. Then she said to Estella, “Eleven going on sixteen.”
“Lonch is almost ready, Estella,” Emyflor called from the kitchen. She had long since dropped the “Miss,” and now she often called Estella “Lola,” especially when they were alone. It meant grandmother, she’d explained, and although it was not the same, Lola reminded her of Nelly, what Jack had called her when they were young.
Hannah zipped her phone back in her purse, and Marie said, “Thank you.”
Marie was pretty, Estella thought. She was wearing just a bit of makeup, not too much. Her pink lipstick reminded Estella that she had not put on any lipstick that morning, since she hadn’t been expecting anyone but Emyflor. She made the excuse that she had to visit the powder room and she collected her purse on the way. She had never worn lipstick in her life until she was an old lady, and now she liked her lips red, and her fingernails, too. Emyflor was good at nails, and she sometimes gave Estella a manicure after she had the housecleaning done. She told Estella that she still had good hands with no arthritic bumps and hardly any age spots, so why not show them off? Estella agreed, why not?
In the powder room, she pursed her lips and applied the red colour that she had come to like so much. There was a brush in the bathroom, and she ran it through her hair.
When she returned to the sitting room, Hannah was slouched as far down on the couch as she could go without falling off, and the younger girl was already asking how long they were staying. She thought both girls were eyeing her warily.
Nicholas came back in at that moment carrying the dog’s leash, saying that he had noticed the backyard was fenced, and did Estella mind if the dog stayed there while they visited? Of course she said yes. The backyard was better than the house. But she would have said yes to anything he asked.
He immediately noticed the photo gallery on the dining room walls: Oliver and Beatrice’s wedding portrait, family photos taken over the years as the number of children grew, the group photo that had been taken on the paddlewheeler at the lake.
“I recognize this one,” he said. “Lake Claire, right?”
She was surprised that he knew about Lake Claire.
He said that his Uncle Don remembered going there, and he remembered the lake holidays as happy times.
“I hardly knew my father,” Nicholas said. “Don was the real father to me.”
She savoured this fact, this bit of information about the family. There were so many things she didn’t know about what had happened after the Diamonds moved to Calgary, after she had become the hard-hearted one with whom no one could get along. She had gotten over that many years ago, although she wouldn’t go as far as to say she had made peace with their desertion.
She told Nicholas that she had not missed a summer at Lake Claire in over sixty years.
“I might be the only person who can say she’s stayed in a Fosters cottage every year since they opened. We’re going in a few days, although I expect things will be different this year. Fosters sold the business over the winter. I don’t imagine it will even be called Fosters anymore.”
She pointed to Jack in a family portrait and said, “You look so much like your grandfather. Do you see the resemblance?”
Nicholas said he’d been told that all his life. He looked again at the paddlewheeler photo and found his father as a boy, with his brother Don standing next to him. And then he wanted to know where Estella was in the photo. She was disappointed that he couldn’t tell, but she pointed to herself, remembering the day the photo had been taken, the spill on her shirt, how she’d slipped it off because of the stain, Gladys’s disapproval of her bare midriff in her two-piece bathing suit. Her father staring at the Kingwell girl, and no one understanding why.
“Come see,” Nicholas said to the girls. “Here’s Auntie Estella. Wasn’t she pretty?”
Hannah got up to have a look but she didn’t say anything.
“I’d take that as a yes,” Nicholas said, and Estella wasn’t sure how.
Then he said that he was working on a bit of a Diamond family tree project and he was hoping Estella would have a look. He had a copy
of the chart in the car.
The phone calls, she thought. There had been half a dozen since the first one, the day of the plant demolition. Nicholas was gracious enough not to mention that she had hung up on him the first few times he’d called, before she’d stopped answering the phone altogether when she saw the area code. She’d wondered, perhaps foolishly, if the reason for the calls was her will, all those Diamonds she didn’t know wondering what she had planned for her money. Lydia was bad enough. She didn’t need any more like her.
Emyflor came from the kitchen then carrying a tray of dishes, and Marie immediately got up to help her set the table. Estella looked at her mother’s good dishes in the cabinet and wondered if this might be an occasion to use them for once, but she didn’t know when they had last been dusted. It was not the kind of thing she asked Emyflor to do.
Marie remarked again on what a beautiful old house it was—the Arts and Crafts architecture, the Queen Anne windows with the coloured panes in the top panel—and Estella explained that her father had copied the design of a house in his hometown in Ontario, and that it had been built, of course, with bricks from the Diamond factory.
Then Emyflor was back again with an omelette that she called a torta and a tray with buns and butter and sliced tomatoes. Estella tried to get her to join them for lunch—it was their habit to have lunch together—but Emyflor said she had too much work to do and excused herself. Marie asked where they could wash their hands and Estella showed them the powder room.
The dining room faced the neighbour’s yard, and a thick hedge of yellow flowers was blooming all along the foundation of their house. Some kind of false sunflower, she couldn’t remember the name. While the others washed their hands, Estella sat at the table and watched her neighbour Kayla deadheading the blossoms. Kayla and her husband had recently bought the house. They had a teenaged daughter whose boyfriend drove a car that sounded like the engine was falling out. It was noisier than Lydia’s van, or more correctly SUV. Estella did not know what SUV stood for.
When the family returned she seated Nicholas in her father’s spot. The dog began barking in the backyard again. The girls wanted to check on her but Marie said to ignore her, as she sat and placed a paper napkin on her lap.
The Diamond House Page 24