Vanitha Sankaran's Editor's Pick:
I Said I Didn't Know
by River Huffman
I couldn't do it because I loved her too much to put her through all the suffering our marriage would have caused her. It's just infatuation, I told myself. Lust. Youthful California sunshine, seaside romance that would surely die on different soil. I'll get over it, I told myself. But years have not lessened the pain of my regret; no sun has set on our cotton field horizon that didn't leave me longing for her company and pondering her fate.
Rosie.
No one else will ever be right for me. Beautiful intelligent vivacious, often silly. Asking me about the style of her hair as if it mattered, worrying about the condition of skin on which I could see no blemish. Slowly parting her lips into a soothing smile; sparkling eyes and warm soft flesh ready to pull me close and relieve my fear and anxiety. Everyone said how beautiful our children would be. Heaven. She would have married me anyway and I wanted to spend my life with her but no, I couldn't do that to her. Couldn't expect a California girl to make that adjustment. I always knew when my time was up and I was discharged from Naval service I would have to move back home and run the family farm. My father's...his father's...his... Couldn't see her as a farmer's wife. She'd never be happy here, I told myself. I told her. She was devastated.
I hope she got over it because I haven't. I threw away all those silly cards and letters and poems she wrote. And the photos, except the one Randy took of me and my new 1987 smoke gray Hyundai. At the last second Rosie stuck her face in the picture and it captured her un-postured beauty the way I want to remember it. A little piece of heaven in the lower right corner of an otherwise banal snapshot. I kept it close for years after. One day my father came in to discuss a second mortgage on the combine and saw the picture on my desk.
"What's this?"
"The Hyundai I bought in California."
"Foreign car?"
"Yessir."
He gave a disapproving grunt. I detected a slight shift in his focus and he asked: "Who's the nigger?"
I said I didn't know.
He tossed it down, not seeing it slide off the back of the desk. "Funny how they all like to jump in front of a camera, ain't it?"
I said it was.