Randy sat on the bench seat of Bluebonnet with the logbook open across his knees and read the last page aloud in a voice I had not heard from him since he was twelve years old. The canvas cover was green and cracked at the spine, the pages swollen from damp. The note at the end was in the blocky pencil of his father, pressed hard enough to dent the paper. To whoever drives Bluebonnet next, it began, the map is not finished, and neither am I.
“Forty eight states, one red line, and I only got Texas and Florida,” Randy read. “Go slow. Stop at every pie sign. Let your mother do the talking at the campground offices, because she has never lost an argument about a reservation. And do not let anybody talk you into a smaller life than the one you want.” He closed the book and put his hand flat on the cover. In the little kitchen the kettle began to whistle, and neither of us moved to take it off the burner.
My son had flown in with a plan. He told me so himself, with his hands open like a man who knew how it would sound. A broker in Plano had offered $38,000 for the motorhome, and Randy had found a condominium ten minutes from his house with a ramp and a pool. He worried that I was alone at a campground at the edge of the Gulf, sixty nine years old, working for four hundred dollars a month and a place to park. “I love you, Mom,” he said. “I am scared for you.” It was an honest fear, and I did not make light of it.
Then I did what I had done for thirty one years behind the wheel of a school bus: I checked the paperwork. Buck had put the title of Bluebonnet in my name alone in 2019, the year before he got sick, and I had the paper in the gray metal box under the bed. I laid it on the table in front of my son. I said that nobody could sell the motorhome but me, and that I did not intend to, and that I appreciated the broker and the pool and the ramp. He read the title twice and looked up. “Dad planned this,” he said. “He planned all of it.”
The roads we mean to travel are never lost, only handed to the next set of hands.
I unrolled the map on the table, the one with the red pen. It started in Abilene, ran east across Louisiana, wandered up the coast of the Atlantic as far as Maine, swung over the top of the country, and dropped down the Pacific through Oregon and California to come home along the border of Mexico. Every state was outlined and numbered. Beside Texas and Florida there was a tiny check mark. Forty six states were still waiting. I said to my son, “Take two weeks off. We will do the first leg together, as far as Savannah.” He started to object, and then he stopped.
The owner of the campground, Mrs. Pate, agreed to cover site 14 with a retired couple from Ohio who had been asking for the job for months. She hugged me at the office door and said she had been waiting for me to leave for a year. I packed the logbook, three boxes of groceries, and my good coffee pot. Randy rented a trailer hitch he did not know how to use. On the first morning I stood behind the motorhome with my arms crossed and taught him to back up the way I taught every new driver: mirror, mirror, mirror, then your gut.
He hit a trash can on the second try and a mailbox on the fourth. By the second afternoon he had it. We crossed the line into Alabama with the windows down and the radio on a station that played the music of his father, and Randy did not once look at his phone. Somewhere past Mobile, he turned it off altogether and put it in the glove box. I watched him lean back in the seat of the driver, one wrist on the wheel, and I thought: there he is. There is the boy who wanted to see everything.
We stopped at every pie sign. In a town in Georgia whose name I had to look up later, a woman in an apron served us peach pie on paper plates at a picnic table under a pecan tree, and Randy ate two slices and told her it was the best he had ever had. She said he was only being kind. He said it was a fact. At the table I wrote the first entry in the green logbook, under the last page of his father, in my best school bus hand: Georgia. Peach. The boy is driving.
At Savannah we parked near the river and watched the container ships slide by like slow buildings. Randy had to fly home on Monday, and he sat on the step of the motorhome with his boots in the sand and said he would not sell it, not ever, if I promised to let him come on one leg every summer. I said I would put him on the schedule. He said he wanted a seat at the table when I crossed the Mississippi, and I said I would save him the one by the window.
The broker called again in the fall. I told him, politely, that Bluebonnet was not for sale, and that I would send him a postcard from Montana. Randy sent me a photograph the same week: a printed map pinned to the wall of his office, with a red line drawn in pen from Abilene to Savannah and another small line beginning there. His daughter had colored in Georgia with a peach crayon. I framed that picture in the kitchen of the motorhome next to the title.
I am writing this from site 61 of a campground in Maine, with the lobster boats coming in at dusk, forty two states behind me. The logbook is nearly full. The last page I am leaving blank on purpose. Someday there will be a note on it, in my hand, to whoever drives Bluebonnet next. I already know the first line. Go slow. Stop at every pie sign. And when they ask you where you are headed, tell them: toward the next one.