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SUMMARY

At the center of The Traveling Disease is young Pamela, a fatherless girl being raised by her mother, Thelma, a tortured if free spirit given to telling wild tales and lying, a woman who thinks little of abandoning her only daughter on the virtual doorstep of her own parents from whom she has been estranged for years. What follows is Pamela attempting to navigate this new and hostile world, as well as a growing desire to discover what has happened to Thelma, both in the past and in the present. She struggles to adapt to a new life with her grandparents, Evelyn and Roy, who reach out to Pamela in their own clumsy, uncertain ways, while they continue to lament past disappointments over Thelma and present concerns over Thelma’s younger sister Ann Marie, a troubled genius who indulges in self-destructive behaviors. In the course of her search, Pamela befriends Melody, a pregnant teenager who works at the laundromat, and Lloyd, an older man who knows the family’s secrets. Throughout the story, Pamela watches the news bulletins about a local boy who has disappeared in the woods behind his house and memorizes facts about Christopher Columbus, whom she likens to her mother—they both had an undeniable impulse to set sail, a traveling disease that could not be cured. In the end, Pamela rewrites her own story, much like the story of Columbus has been rewritten throughout history, and it is in this revision that she is finally able to reconcile the loss of her mother.

EXCERPT

The fire caught with the second match. My mother waited for the charcoal to grow warm enough, then skewered hotdogs on the broken TV antennas she liked to use as roasting sticks. She held the hotdogs over the grill and watched them cook. It was an old grill, well used even before my mother began preparing our meals on it. The bottom was rusted thin as tissue paper, the lid was missing altogether, and the grill itself was burned black and thick.

“Works like a charm,” she insisted.

I was eight. I wore my favorite outfit: I’M A ROTTEN KID t-shirt with a faded and half-peeled-off decal of a worm poking its head through an apple, cut-offs, and my mother’s old black boots, the toes stuffed with newspaper. I knew we were moving, but I didn’t want to. When I was very small, my mother and I moved a lot. There had been an apartment in South Carolina and a duplex in Georgia, but I couldn’t remember anything before the large brick house that had been in my stepfather’s family for more than a hundred years. I thought that if I caught a firefly my mother would change her mind.

I cupped my fingers and moved them like paddles through the air, trying to gather a few fireflies that were winking in the near dark. They scattered quickly in the stand of trees behind the trailer park. It was early June; the evenings were cool. The dogwoods had just finished blooming and the nut trees had sprouted their baby-leaves, tiny and green. When my mother wasn’t looking, I shoved a just-bloomed periwinkle vine—a short one—into my pocket.

My mother blinked against the smoke rising in her eyes as she twirled the TV antennas over the fire. I listened to the highway traffic, blocked from my view by the trailer. The cars drifted easily down the sloping highway.

I asked, “Do we have any ketchup?”

“There’s bread,” she answered.

As it grew darker, there were more fireflies. I watched their tiny blink-blinks in the rhododendron bushes, the low branches of baby pines, among the dense stock of crab grass and weeds growing thick in the dirt. I raised my hands through the dusk air, continuing my search.

My mother shook her hair from her eyes. Like me, she never tied it back; she let it hang loose past her shoulders. She lifted a hotdog from the fire, reaching for a slice of bread from the plastic bag at her feet. She wrapped the bread around the hotdog, pulling it off its makeshift skewer, then motioned for me to come, but I wouldn’t. Instead, I opened my hand a little, just enough to show her the yellowish light glowing through the spaces between my fingers.

After we ate, my mother gathered a handful of dirt from the ground and emptied it on the grill. The fire went out like a storm, and full darkness followed.