The Diamond House by Dianne Warren

Author:Dianne Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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