Read Blameless in Abaddon for Free Online

that her talent for transmuting life’s conventional horrors into black comedy would give him a needed lift.
    â€œOh, God—I’m so sorry.”
    â€œSay something funny, Jenny.”
    â€œFunny? How can prostate cancer be funny?”
    â€œIt’s not as funny as lung cancer, but it’s still pretty funny.”
    â€œYou tell Mom yet?”
    â€œHaven’t worked up the courage.”
    â€œThis’ll be good for her. All those years of wasting her anxiety skills on trivia. ‘What if I run out of candy on Halloween?’ ‘What’ll happen when the boy who cuts my grass goes to college?’ Now she’s got something she can sink her teeth into.”
    â€œCancer is worthy of her.”
    â€œWe’re gonna whup this thing, Brother Man,” Jenny insisted, shifting into her impersonation of Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat. “We’re gonna whup this thing till Hell won’t have it again.”
    The next people to learn of his diagnosis were his two exfiancées. Robin McLaughlin, a dental technician with whom he’d lived while they both attended Perkinsville Community College, began weeping hysterically. Filtered through the telephone receiver, her sobs sounded like the death rattle of a Kennel of Joy client. At first he declined to call Brittany Rabson, who claimed to despise him these days but who was nevertheless continually arranging for their lives to intersect in pointless ways. (“Marty, do you have those snapshots of us feeding the ducks in Fairmount Park?”) After thinking it over, he decided he’d better contact her: if the news arrived indirectly, he would never hear the end of it. Upon learning of Martin’s tumor, Brittany reacted with characteristic narcissism, insisting that when he was in his final throes, withering away on a morphine drip,
she’d
be the one he could count on,
she’d
be the one who’d appear at his bedside, assuming he had the foresight to summon her.
    Then came Mom, a Montclair, New Jersey, rose fancier and neurasthenic who habitually came on like Olga Prozorova yearning for Moscow, though in Siobhan’s case the locus of her fantasies was her ancestral Belfast. After absorbing the blow, she predictably went to pieces, calming down only after Martin explained that he intended to visit the Celestial City.
    â€œYour father would like that.”
    He saved his campaign manager for last: Vaughn Poffley, a scrappy extrovert who, when he wasn’t making sure the office of JP remained in Republican hands, earned his living teaching driver’s ed (“dread,” the students called it) at Abaddon Senior High.
    Martin and Vaughn had first met at a school board meeting. It was June 15, 1991, and Martin had come to protest the proposed elimination of driver’s ed from the senior high curriculum, a budget reduction scheme he’d read about that morning in the
Abaddon Sentinel.
Recognized by the chairman, he stood up and explained that his conscience had compelled him to attend. As their local magistrate, he’d seen firsthand the damage that lack of driver’s education caused. Martin told about broken bodies and bashed brains, dashed hopes and ruined lives. Were these loving parents truly willing to send their children onto the open road untutored in the art of defensive driving?
    All in all, a brilliant performance, and by evening’s end not only did Vaughn still have a job but Driving 101 had become a graduation requirement.
    As the meeting broke up, Vaughn marched over and introduced himself—a short, balding, effusive man with a mild lisp. “Any time you need a favor,” he said, clasping Martin’s hand, “all you gotta do is ask.”
    Normally Martin would have dismissed Vaughn’s offer as the rhetorical pleasantry it was, but he’d been feeling overwhelmed of late, ever since Brittany had moved out on him. While the woman’s