“Thank you so much for your trouble,” she said.
“No trouble,” Estella said, which it hadn’t been since Emyflor had done the work, and she was thrilled to have guests for lunch. In the days before her mother died, there had rarely been a day when someone from the family didn’t stop in for a meal. An invitation was never expected or required.
“Did you know Hannah’s middle name is Beatrice?” Nicholas asked. “After your mother.”
“Is that so?” Estella said to Hannah.
“Granny name,” Hannah said. “I don’t love it, obviously.”
“Hannah,” Nicholas said, looking embarrassed, but Estella waved it off and said, “I believe there’s a Princess Beatrice somewhere in the royal family now. That must give it a modern edge.”
The girl made it clear with a shrug that she didn’t care about the royal family, and then she picked up her fork. Nicholas did the same, and then Marie, and Estella thought it was as though the girl were an actual princess, and she had just given the royal assent to begin eating. She had not been around little girls for a long time.
Estella changed the subject by saying, “So, you’re on your way to Winnipeg. A family visit?”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” Hannah said.
Nicholas and Marie exchanged looks, and then chose to ignore her.
Marie said, “Yes, my parents are there.”
Estella wondered what was going on in Winnipeg.
“Is there any salt for the tomatoes, please?” the younger girl asked.
Estella said, “What’s a tomato without salt?” and she fetched the salt shaker from the kitchen.
After the meal, Nicholas turned the conversation back to the family tree. He explained that he’d been able to track down a lot of missing information on the Internet, but there were still a few dates he didn’t have.
“Would you mind looking at it?” he asked.
Marie said, “Quickly though, Nick. We have a long way to go.”
Estella didn’t want them to leave. It seemed they had just arrived.
“Let’s have a look, then,” she said.
Nicholas went to retrieve the family tree from the car while Estella and Marie carried the lunch dishes to the sink. Marie checked on the dog through the window and then offered to do the dishes while Nicholas showed Estella his chart. Before Estella could say she wouldn’t hear of it, Marie was putting the stopper in the sink.
She heard Nicholas at the door again so she left Marie and went to see what he had for her to look at. He was carrying a cardboard tube, and he removed a large piece of poster paper and unrolled it on the coffee table in the sitting room. The two girls were by now on the couch, looking at something together on Hannah’s phone.
The writing on the chart was very small and the room was dark. Estella pulled one of the floor lamps closer and positioned it so that it cast light on the poster. She saw three names at the top of the page: Beatrice Shaughnessy, Oliver Diamond, and Salina Passmore. Oliver was sandwiched between the two women. Estella’s generation of names followed below Oliver and Beatrice, and all down the page more names were carefully written in black pen, her brothers’ children and their wives, their children and the ones that followed, spreading out toward the bottom, until there were so many names they formed a tangle of descendants at the foot of the tree. Estella was struck by the stark illustration of her failure to reproduce. She was the only one of the five Oliver Diamond offspring who had not created her own vertical inventory. “Estella Diamond, 1924” was a lonely anomaly at the top right of the page.
“Am I related to all these people?” she asked.
There were certainly more than the forty-five Diamonds in the lake photo, the number they had all celebrated as a record without most of them knowing how four of them were actually related.
Nicholas was pointing to a woman’s name on his chart, a descendant of Theo’s. “This one became a diplomat,” he said. “I think she’s in South Africa now. And this family . . . the oldest boy here . . . he went to Australia to learn to surf and married a woman from Sydney. They live there. This one’s an air force pilot, so he’s all over the place. He was stationed just down the road from you for a time, in Moose Jaw. Apparently there’s an air force training centre there. The pilots can learn to fly without any mountains to run into.”
“Moose Jaw,” Estella said. “I wish I’d known.” She was thinking, So close, and he didn’t call. Well, maybe he had and she’d hung up on him.
Nicholas moved his hands away from the two outside edges of the poster and it rolled itself up again.
“Why don’t I leave this with you?” he said. “I have other copies.”
Marie came from the kitchen then.
“I wasn’t sure where the dishes went so I left them on the counter,” she said.
Right away the younger girl jumped up from the couch and said, “Can we please go now?”
So this was it, Estella thought. They were leaving.
She tried to think of a way to keep them there just a little longer, ten more minutes, but Marie was making no move to sit again, and both girls were at her side.
Marie said, “Girls, take the leash and get Livvy. We have to go now.”
Hannah grabbed the leash and went to the back door.
Paris whispered something in her mother’s ear, and Marie said, “You know where the powder room is.”
“Come with me,” Paris said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Marie said. “How old are you, anyway?” But then she went with her.
When Marie and Paris were gone, Nicholas got up from his chair and crossed the room to look in the cabinet by the fireplace. Oliver’s first brick had caught his eye. It had been mounted on an oak base, and there was a brass plaque with the date of the plant’s opening.
“This brick,” Nicholas said. “It must have been the first one out of the kiln, was it?”
As she lifted herself off the couch to open the cabinet door for him, she lost her balance partway up and dropped back down, and was lucky to land on the chair and not the floor. Marie returned at that moment, and she stepped quickly across the room to help her.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Estella said, shaking away Marie’s hand and sounding grumpier than she’d intended. She hated for people to think she needed help. She struggled again to propel herself onto her feet, and this time got her legs under her, but in the meantime she had forgotten what she’d been about to do. She heard the back door, and Hannah and the dog came in. Hannah had the leash in one hand and her phone in the other. Estella could hear the dog’s toenails scrabbling on the hardwood floor as it tugged on the leash.
Marie said, firmly now, “Your aunt is tired, Nick. And Hannah, please put the phone away while we’re in company. You know the rule. If you don’t follow it, I’m going to confiscate it.”
She sounded impatient with Hannah, and Nicholas as well, like a teacher who’s had enough.
Nicholas looked torn, not quite ready to give up on what he was looking at in the cabinet.
The brick. That was it. She’d been about to show him the brick.
Paris came back from the powder room then, and Marie hustled the girls toward the door, saying, “Come. Time to go. Thank your Auntie Estella for the lunch.” She turned to Estella. “Thank you so much for the visit. You don’t need to see us out. Stay where you are.”
Well, of course she was going to see them out.
She followed them to the door. Marie and the girls and the dog stepped outside and walked toward the car, but Nicholas lingered. He took a card out of his pocket and handed it to Estella.
“Give me a call if you see any mistakes on the tree,” he said. “Or if you need anything.”
Estella looked at the card with its many phone numbers. The term calling card came to her.
“Thank you,” she said, slipping the card into the pocket of her slacks, “but I won’t be needing anything. I
manage on my own.”
“Come on, Nick,” Marie called from the street as she opened the back car door for the girls. Estella noticed that they had to climb over whatever was piled on the floor of the car, bags perhaps. The car was loaded up as though they were going on a camping trip. The dog jumped in on top of the bags.
“Girls,” Nicholas called. “Take a good look at this house. This is where you came from.”
Hannah leaned out the car window with her phone.
“Okay, Dad,” she said with obvious sarcasm. Estella supposed she was taking a picture.
“No one has a real camera anymore,” Nicholas said. “Everything is digital, in the cloud.”
The cloud, Estella thought. It wasn’t infirmity that left old people out. It was technology. Pretty soon she wouldn’t know how to work her coffee pot.
“You’d better get going,” she said with regret. Then she added, “Call me when you get there, so I know you arrived safely.”
She heard Emyflor coming down the stairs.
“Emyflor, my nephew is leaving.” She loved saying that. My nephew.
Emyflor appeared wearing yellow rubber gloves.
“Bye-bye, then,” she said, standing halfway down the stairs and waving one gloved hand. “So nice to have visitors. Miss Estella gets lonely.”
“Lonely?” Nicholas asked. “Really?”
“She’s very kind,” Estella said, “but don’t listen to her.”
Nicholas left then, and Estella watched him cross the street and get in the car. He did a U-turn as they drove away, and she got a good look at Marie, who did not wave at her and seemed to be speaking sharply to Nicholas. She couldn’t see what the girls were doing but she imagined them with headphones on, already tuned in to their phones or their music or whatever they had with them.
She closed the front door, and she shook her head and she said, “Gold digger.”
“Gold digger?” Emyflor said. “What does that mean?”
Estella didn’t know why she’d said it. She must have been thinking of Marie, the way she had admired the house. She explained to Emyflor what a gold digger was, and Emyflor looked horrified. “You mean they want to steal from you?” she asked. “Those people?”
“Not they,” Estella said. “She. And don’t worry, I’ve got a good will, and I’m leaving everything to charity. And everything is not as much as people might think it is.”
Emyflor still looked concerned and said, “You sit down and rest now, Lola,” and she went back upstairs to her cleaning.
Estella returned to the sitting room and saw the family tree still rolled up on the coffee table. She took it to the dining room where the light was better and spread it out again and had a good look at it.
She found Nicholas Diamond’s name on the chart and followed the line up to her brother Jack. There was no date of death because his body had never been found. Phyllis’s name was there, the first wife, and then Rose, and Rose’s other husband, the one she married after Jack. Then Jack and Rose’s boys. Don’s name had a man’s name next to it, Austin. Was that a mistake? Probably not, these days. Ryan had Dora’s name next to his, and then a question mark, and Estella wondered if he had disappeared the same way his father had.
She searched for Lydia’s name but it wasn’t there. She got a pen and found the spot where it should be and wrote it in. Then she realized she had written it in the wrong place, under Jim instead of Paul, so she crossed it out. She found Paul’s name and saw that Lydia was there after all. She couldn’t remember the names of Lydia’s husbands, so she wrote three husbands, and then she added Mercy’s name, and Lonny’s in a direct line from Mercy’s.
There, she thought, she had done her part, and Lydia, with her three husbands, was proof that the Diamonds here were just as modern as they were everywhere else. She rolled the paper up again and slipped it back in the cardboard tube, and then put it in her broom closet next to the vacuum cleaner.
She took the card Nicholas had given her out of her pocket and examined it.
Bow River Resources, Nicholas Diamond, Oil and Gas Exploration Services.
Not a calling card. A business card. And not the best business to be in these days. From what she understood, Alberta was no longer the mecca that had lured all the Diamonds across the border. She hoped Nicholas had a secure job.
She stuck the card with a magnet to the fridge door and went out to the backyard to sit in a chair and rest her eyes while the sun was out. But then she saw flowers still blooming along the fence, her fall asters. They looked terrible, past their prime, slumped over with the weight of the blossoms. She retrieved her clippers from her garden shed and chopped them all down. It was October, she thought, and they were going to go soon anyway, so why wait? She began to gather the chopped flowers, but she was overtaken by tiredness so she left the plants where they lay in the flower bed and made her way to her chair on the patio—a new wicker armchair that had replaced her mother’s old one—and she sat down heavily and closed her eyes. The chair was in the shade but the sun was shining on her feet. She could feel its warmth.
The only time she ever had a nap in the afternoon was when she was sick. Still, she closed her eyes and fell sound asleep in the chair. Behind her eyelids, she saw a little girl curled up in a child-sized dip in a pink clay gully, like the ones at the plant. She could almost feel the fine dry clay, like flour or cornstarch. Her eyes fluttered open, fighting sleep, and she tried to remember if a child had gone missing at the plant, or if she herself had ever been lost in the hills, but she didn’t think so. She closed her eyes again, and slept for another hour, until Emyflor woke her up with a cup of tea.
She had a crick in her neck but her mind was clear. She remembered she’d had visitors, Nicholas and Marie. She remembered the girls, the younger one, Paris, and the sassy one, Hannah. She drank her tea and thought about them, and wondered why they were going to Winnipeg. Something had not been right. After she’d finished her tea, she rose carefully from the wicker chair, and when she noticed the flowers lying in the flower bed—peonies, not asters—she remembered immediately what had happened to them, that she herself had chopped them down.
It was terrible, the confusion. She’d be so certain one minute and then know she’d had it wrong the next. She tried to drag the flowers with a rake from the flower bed into a pile on the lawn, but it was too much work. When she was half done, she found Emyflor putting the lunch dishes away in the kitchen and asked her if she would mind carrying the flowers to the garbage bin in the alley before she left, without adding any kind of an explanation.
“Flowers?” Emyflor said. “What flowers?”
“The ones I cut down,” Estella said. Then she added by way of explanation, even though she knew it wasn’t true, “They were almost done.”
“No, no, no,” Emyflor said, looking at the piles of flowers through the kitchen window. “Your beautiful peonies, Lola.”
Estella said, “I think the dog must have got into them. I couldn’t be bothered trying to stand them up again.”
Emyflor said, “Never mind, they’ll come back next year.”
Later, once the flowers had been loaded into the bin and Emyflor was getting ready to leave, the two of them were standing in the kitchen and Emyflor said, “Tell me again. That word gold digger.” She was always trying to improve her English and she knew Estella had been a teacher. She often asked her what words meant, and she kept track in a little notebook she carried in her purse.
“Gold digger,” Estella said. “I don’t think anyone uses that term anymore.”
She felt a little guilty for implying that Marie was a gold digger. Where had that idea come from? Such distressing thoughts invaded her head sometimes, like armies of ill will.
“I think I’m almost out of Ivory,” Estella said, looking at the near-empty bottle of dish soap by the sink. “I’ll put that on the shopping list, then.”
There was a notepad on the counter. Estella found a new page and wrote “dish soap.”<
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Before Emyflor left, Estella said to her, “This is a big house. You should live here. When your family comes, you should all move in.”
They talked sometimes about what would happen when the family was able to immigrate: how Emyflor would find a house and a good school for the kids. She wanted them to come before they grew up and started families of their own in the Philippines.
Emyflor laughed at the idea of her kids living with Estella, and said, “You’re used to a quiet house.”
“This house wasn’t always quiet,” Estella said. “It had a lot of people in it at one time.”
When Emyflor was gone, Estella heated a can of soup for supper and turned on the television. Before she knew it, she was asleep in her chair.
THE TELEPHONE RANG and woke her up. It was dark outside. The call display showed a Manitoba number so she answered it. It would be Nicholas calling to say they had arrived. She sat in her chair with the cordless phone she had finally mastered and listened as he said he hoped he wasn’t calling too late, but he just wanted to let her know they were in Winnipeg. The traffic had been good, he said, not too many trucks.
Estella thought it sounded as though he’d been drinking. He was slurring his words.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she said.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Nicholas said. “Since you asked me to call, and then if I didn’t call . . . well, you know.”
“Thank you,” she said again.
There was silence on the other end of the line. She almost said goodbye and hung up, thinking he’d conveyed what he wanted to, but then he said, “I wasn’t completely honest with you this afternoon.”
She was immediately wary. The wife, she thought. Marie. Maybe she had been right that Marie was a gold digger. She had some idea that Estella was a wealthy old lady, and she had her eye on Estella’s will.
But that was not what he had called to say.
“I wanted to tell you we’ve separated,” Nicholas said. “Marie is staying here in Winnipeg for the summer. We’ve just had a meal with her parents, the last supper, I guess. I’m sorry, I’ve had quite a bit to drink. I don’t usually drink, but this is an exceptional circumstance.”
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