When Darlene and Roy Pickett sold the house in Yuma, Arizona, after forty-six years and bought a used thirty-one-foot motor home with the money, their daughter called it the most selfish thing two grown people had ever done.
"That house was our inheritance, Mom," Shelly said on the phone from Phoenix. "Todd and I were counting on it. And you're going to spend it on gas?"
Darlene stood in the empty living room, among the moving boxes, and looked out the window at the motor home parked at the curb. It was white with a brown stripe and a little ladder on the back. Roy was already sitting in the driver's seat, adjusting the mirrors.
"Not all of it, honey," Darlene said. "Just the part we need."
Darlene was seventy-two. She had driven a school bus for the Yuma school district for thirty-one years, which meant she could back a thirty-one-foot motor home into a space with eight inches on either side, and Roy could not. Roy was seventy-four. He had been a heating and air-conditioning man his whole working life, and he had a bad heart and a good sense of humor and a folded piece of paper he kept in his shirt pocket.
They had been married fifty-one years.
The kids did not know about the piece of paper. The kids did not know a lot of things.
Their son, Todd, called that night from Denver.
"Dad, Shelly's really upset."
"I know she is, son."
"So am I, honestly. You've got a heart condition. Mom's seventy-two. You're going to drive a motor home across the whole country? For what?"
Roy looked across the table at his wife. They were sitting in the little dinette of the motor home with two cups of decaf, parked in the lot of a Walmart in Yuma, their first night as homeless people.
"For some people we owe," Roy said.
"Owe what?"
"Thank you," Roy said. "We owe a lot of people thank you, son. And we're running out of time to say it."
The piece of paper had been in Roy's wallet for almost fifty years.
He had started it in 1979, on a cold night in Wyoming, in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Every time somebody had done something for the Picketts that they could never pay back, Roy had written it down. A name. A place. A year. What they did.
There were nine names on the list.
A trucker named Lyle Brandt, who had pulled their old Chevy out of a snowbank outside Rawlins, Wyoming, in January 1979, when Shelly was eight months old and burning up with fever, and driven them forty miles to a hospital.
A nurse named Gloria Fuentes, in Amarillo, Texas, who had stayed fourteen hours past her shift with Todd when he was born two months early in 1981.
A farmer named Elmer Hagen in Dodge City, Kansas, who had given Roy a job and a trailer to live in, in 1984, when the air-conditioning company in Yuma laid off half its men and the Picketts had eleven dollars in the bank.
And six more, all the way to Maine.
Roy had always meant to go back and thank them. Every one. In person.
He was seventy-four, with a bad heart. He had decided that meant it was time.
They left Yuma on the first of October.
Darlene drove. Roy navigated, with a paper map, because he did not trust the phone. They took the back roads, the old two-lanes, and stopped wherever they felt like stopping.
In Rawlins, Wyoming, they found Lyle Brandt in a small yellow house on the edge of town. He was eighty-eight, in a wheelchair, with oxygen. He did not remember them at first.
Then Roy said, "January 1979. A Chevy Impala in a snowbank. A baby with a fever."
Lyle Brandt looked at him for a long time. Then he started to cry.
"I always wondered if that baby made it," he said.
Darlene took out her phone and showed him a picture of Shelly at forty-eight, laughing, with her three children.
They stayed for supper. Lyle's daughter made chili. Lyle told trucking stories until ten o'clock. When they left, he held Roy's hand for a long time at the door.
Roy crossed the first name off the list.
They sent pictures to the kids. Every stop. Every name.
Shelly did not answer. Todd sent a thumbs-up, once.
"They'll come around," Roy said.
"Will they?" Darlene said.
"They're our kids," Roy said. "They'll come around."
In Amarillo, they could not find Gloria Fuentes.
The hospital where Todd was born had changed names twice. The nursing office had no record of her. They asked at three churches and a Mexican bakery. On the third day, a woman at the bakery said, "Gloria? The old nurse? She volunteers at the hospital on Thursdays. In the gift shop."
It was Wednesday.
They decided to wait. They parked the motor home at an RV park on the edge of town and went to bed early.
At three in the morning, Darlene woke up because Roy was not breathing right.
He was sitting up on the edge of the bed in the dark, with one hand flat on his chest and the other gripping the mattress. His face was gray and wet with sweat.
"Darlene," he said. "I think it's my heart."
Darlene was out of bed and dialing before he finished the sentence.
Shelly's phone rang at four-thirty in the morning in Phoenix.
She answered it half asleep. It was her mother, and her mother's voice was very calm, the voice she had used on the school bus for thirty-one years when the kids in the back were fighting.
"Shelly, honey. It's Mom. Your daddy's in the hospital in Amarillo. It's his heart. They're taking him in now."
Shelly sat straight up in bed.
"Which hospital, Mom?"
Darlene told her.
There was a long silence on the line.
"Mom," Shelly said slowly. "Isn't that where Todd was born?"
"It is," Darlene said. "And honey, I think you'd better come."