In 1980 adult Jamie Ferguson returned to his hometown to collect an inheritance and is forced to relive the Polio scourge of the summer of 1946. He was nine-years-old and the nation was recovering from the trauma of World War II. His mother had died, the grandparents' farm had been lost and his father, a navy veteran, dealt with his war wound pain with alcohol. Despite all the difficulties, nine-year-old Jamie was naively determined to earn money to buy back his grandparents' farm. He collected and sold scrap newspapers to the town's African American junk dealer. As the summer progressed Jamie developed a hopeless puppy love for Mindy, a teenager that had been unusually kind to him. His world would change forever as heartbreak after heartbreak followed. Over the years he willed himself to forget them. But thirty-five years later those tragic recollections were awakened when he claimed the very puzzling inheritance from Junky, the African American junk dealer.
