Charlie looked over at Anne.  She half-sat, half-lay on the old car’s bench seat, nodding in time to the music from the tape player.  She wore an old white t-shirt and cutoff shorts; her long legs were propped up, bare feet out the window, catching the hot rush of air in her long, slim toes.  She was a tall, slender girl, with short, curly blonde hair; Charlie had known her since they were five.

“Forty miles,” she read from a road sign.

“Won’t be able to do anything this time of the morning,” Charlie said.  “Have to wait until later to get married.”

“Yeah.”  Anne examined her fingers.  “We can get a room, right?”

“Should be able to.”

Charlie stretched and wriggled to find a more comfortable spot on the car’s seat.  His jeans were sweaty, itchy, and his gray t-shirt was soaked with sweat.  He could feel sweat running down his legs into his old lineman’s boots.  He was tall and broad, with wide shoulders and hard muscles from a life of farm work.  His thin brown hair and gray eyes were the only thing Charlie had in common with his father.  Charlie’s father was a thin, stern, unsmiling man, bent under by decades of labor on the hundred and fifty acres south of Atlantic that were his life. 

Charlie didn’t regret leaving.  Not at all.

“Wish this old car had air conditioning,” he groused.  “I’ll need a shower as soon as we stop.” 

Anne nodded agreement. 

Charlie was nineteen.  Anne was eighteen.  For a year now, they’d planned their escape from the dusty little western Iowa farm town where they’d grown up – to run off, get married, start a new life.

“How long you figure we’ll stay in Las Vegas?” Anne asked.

“Couple days.  We’ll want to push right on to California.  Get some jobs, a place to stay.”

“Yeah.”

She reached over, pulled one of Charlie’s hands off the wheel – his hands were hard, scarred and calloused from working on farm equipment, throwing hay bales, wrestling cattle and hogs.  She wrapped her soft, warm fingers around his.

“We’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know.”

The car’s exhaust rumbled, the tires hummed on the road, the hot desert air rushed through.  Now, in August, even the night air was hot.

“You think you’ll get a job in a garage,” Anne asked.  “Like you planned?”

“Should,” Charlie said.  “I’ve worked on cars enough.”

“Good.”

Ahead of them, the billion lights of Las Vegas threw a glow into the night sky.  Charlie pushed down on the gas pedal, feeling the need now, at last, to hurry.

That afternoon they showered and dressed – Charlie in his old brown suit, Anne in the pale blue dress she’d worn to her senior prom – and were married in a chapel to the side of the casino-hotel where they’d rented a room.

That night they lay together in the dark hotel room, the glittering lights outside flickering off the ceiling.

“I love you,” Charlie told Anne afterwards.  “Always.”

“Always,” Anne answered, her voice soft and sleepy.

They left for Los Angeles the next day, driving through the blast-furnace sun, across yet another bare desert to yet another place they’d never seen.

Anne found a job as a waitress in a lunch counter three blocks from their cheap upstairs apartment.  Charlie looked for a job as a mechanic, without success, for six weeks.  He finally took a low-paying job in an auto-parts store.  That same day, the old Ford threw a connecting rod through its oil pan. 

The car sat in the parking lot of the apartment building for six weeks before they were able to save enough money for a new engine.  Charlie and his friend Dan from the auto-parts store worked for a whole weekend to replace the engine, using tools and a hoist borrowed from Dan’s father. 

“I really didn’t need that to happen,” Charlie told Anne that night as he rested, exhausted, on the couch.

“I know.”

“Maybe we can buy a newer car next year.”

“Maybe next year.”

The fall turned into a rainy, cool California winter.  Charlie worked in the parts store, and Anne worked at the lunch counter until one day a photographer offered to shoot a portfolio of photos of her.

“He said it might lead to an acting or modeling career,” she told Charlie that night.  “He said I’ve got the look that the industry’s looking for right now.”

“All right,” Charlie said, not feeling entirely comfortable with the whole thing.

Anne posed for the photos, but she didn’t get an offer of any modeling work, or acting work either, in spite of the many packets of photos she mailed to various agencies.

Three days after Christmas, the old Ford broke down again, and Charlie spent four days taking apart the transmission and putting it back together.  The fourth day it rained, and Charlie caught influenza from laying on the wet ground under the car.   The influenza grew into pneumonia.  He spent a week at home sick.  When he recovered, he went back to the parts store to find his job filled by someone else.

“You were still on probation,” his former boss told him.  “I couldn’t wait to see how long it would be before you decided to come back to work.”

“I was sick!”

“Too bad,” the man told him.  “But people, well, they always get sick.  Usually it’s just a bad hangover, or some personal thing.  I couldn’t afford to wait for you.  Sorry, kid.”

January and February went by, and Charlie wasn’t able to find another job.  Anne took to going out with a friend from work, often not returning to the little apartment until late at night.  On the first of April, she admitted to Charlie that she’d been seeing someone else.

“I’m going to move in with him, Charlie,” she told him.  “He knows people in show business.  He’s going to get me into an audition for a soap commercial.  It could be where I get started.”

“What about our plans?” Charlie felt helpless.

“I can’t help that.  We were too young, Charlie.  We didn’t know anything.  I’m sorry.”

The next day Charlie spent at an employment agency, coming home at last with a lead to a job in a warehouse.  Anne’s clothes and personal things were gone when he got there.  Six days later he was served with divorce papers.

Charlie arrived back home in Atlantic, alone, that fall.  He stayed at his parent’s house for a week before finding a job and apartment in town.  His parents asked him what happened, and he told them everything.  When he was finished, his father, for the first time in years, laid a hand on Charlie’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, son,” was all he said.

Three months later Charlie had a letter from his friend Dan, telling him that Anne had taken a job making pornographic movies.

He read the letter from Dan three times.  Finally he put it down, and walked to the window of the apartment he’d rented above the hardware store on the main street.  He stood, looking out the window at a rainy evening, watching the quiet, dimly lit little town, silently comparing it to the bright lights of the cities he’d seen in the last year.  He realized that he didn’t miss them. 

It doesn’t always matter where you’ve been, Charlie told himself, silently.  It’s where you are that counts.