Read Online The Garneau Block by Todd Babiak - Free Book Online

afternoon in the yard. Instead, Madison stuck her hands deeper into the soil, and twisted them, and made fists.
    â€œâ€¦and what kind of person even thinks about buying a Hummer? It’s a crime against humanity. And guess what your father thinks? He thinks they’re cool. Cool! As though his Yukon Denali isn’t big and pointless enough. To him I say, once global warming melts the Arctic and the oceans go cold and start another ice age, well, what then? What about Madison, or your grandchildren if–we hope and hope–wehave grandchildren? What are they going to do when Alberta is rendered uninhabitable?”
    â€œWe’ll move to Belize.”
    â€œMadison Weiss! How could you say such a thing.”
    The women were ten feet apart in the yard, separated by a tray with ice water in a sealed pitcher. Madison crawled over and poured herself a glass, and watched Abby clip and trim, the purple veins snaking through her legs and the slight tremble in her hands. “I love you, Mom.”
    Abby Weiss stood up with a foot-long rose-bush branch in one hand and a pair of hedge trimmers in the other. She looked as if she had been slapped with a glove. Her straw hat was crooked and her 1993 Folk Fest T-shirt had ridden up, revealing her fifty-eight-year-old abs. “Did you just say you love me?”
    â€œI did.”
    â€œBut you never…”
    â€œI just did.”
    â€œWell, frick.” Abby’s eyes glistened and she dropped the hedge trimmers and the rose-bush branch and baby-walked to Madison. They hugged on the warm front lawn, with the laughter and provocations and tinking glasses of nearby restaurant patios audible about them. “That made my day, sweetheart. It really did.”
    Madison squirrelled out of her mother’s grasp. “Get back to your roses.”
    â€œGladly.” Abby wiped her tears with the Folk Fest shirt. “Gladly.”
    Her mother returned to the rose bushes and Madison hunched over the annuals bed again, digging deep into the soilwith a decommissioned screwdriver. It was her job to battle the seemingly endless white roots of dandelions. She reached to the bottom of a particularly nasty one and heard a large vehicle apply its brakes. On her knees, she saw one white van and then another in front of 10 Garneau. Without a word, both Madison and Abby dropped their tools and hurried to the sidewalk.
    A small team of men and women in matching blue uniforms resembling hospital scrubs emerged from the vans with a variety of indoor and outdoor implements of improvement: buckets, sponges, mops, bleaches, rakes and shovels, garbage bags and touch-up paints in appropriate colours.
    Abby approached two deeply tanned men who stayed outside while the rest of the team went in the front door. Stunned and feeling oddly violated, the way she had felt on Monday night when Jonas slipped her VISA card into the door jamb, Madison hung back on the sidewalk.
    â€œLovely to see you,” said Abby.
    The two men looked at one another.
    â€œWhat are you people doing here?”
    Now that Madison had grown used to the idea that Jeanne and Katie were in Mexico or Calgary, that Benjamin Perlitz had died in a pool of his own blood in the master bedroom upstairs, she was beginning to accept 10 Garneau as it was. Madison realized, on the sidewalk, as a cloud of tiny bugs formed over her head, that she had been taking a sort of secret pleasure in the tragedy; the sort of pleasure she once took in muscle injuries after cross-country ski races.
    The whole city had been implicated in the death of Benjamin Perlitz, just as it had been implicated in the murderedpolicemen, the thirteen-year-old girl found dead on the golf course, the Somali cab driver stabbed and stuffed into his own trunk, the pregnant wife beaten to death and abandoned in a ditch. The whole country and culture had been implicated. Yet this particular horror wasn’t just local. It was next door. Jeanne