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FOUR YEARS LATER
Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated. Vietnam burning. The Beatles had broken up. The world wasn't as artistic or pure for Virginia Marjorie Curtis when she graduated college. Still, she kept heart as she usually did in times of distress. The feeling of that embossed diploma stating her long-waited achievements, and even equally exciting, her beautiful, renewed golden hair, was more than enough to get her by.
There should be a word for the feeling of outgrowing a place but belonging to it no matter how much it's denied. Virginia decided that was it. That was the feeling she had felt since the moment she stepped off the train and breathed in the Tulsan air.
The fresh, summer breeze swept through Virginia, gooseflesh peppering her skin. The sun shone splendidly, raining its fiery droplets across Tulsa. She could almost taste it now, the comfort and hopes that were laying out a golden path for her to walk on. After four years of indulging in rich cultures across the sea and exposing her mind to the brilliance of artistic minds, Virginia finally made her choice. So she sat in that rumbling car with its creaky metal and humming driver, the window rolled down and the fragrant scent of wildflowers that seemed to praise and sing their sweet language as she passed them.
Virginia was home.
She hadn't been back to Tulsa since she was eighteen years old. The prospects of finding a job in a city as extravagant as New York were slimming, as not many schools required art to be taught— much to Virginia's displeasure. Darry managed to talk her into coming home for at least the end of summer. She hemmed and hawed about it— living in New York had a way of liberating her in the same way that a small town in Oklahoma made her feel too small— but she finally conceded defeat and agreed to move back in with her brothers before she found a job.
Whispers traveled to her ear. She supposed many of the faces she'd grown up around hadn't expected a return from the jewel of the Northside since her departure. Eyes squinted, mouths swearing to the heavens that they had recognized the girl wearing the black hat upon her head.
"Holy hell, that Darry's kid sister?"
"My, she changed an awful lot."
"She's a Curtis, alright. Finally got them good looks too."
Tim Shepard rose to his feet, almost ripping off his sunglasses as the taxi cab passed the Dingo. "Well, I'll be damned if that ain't Virginia Curtis..."
At his side, the fiercely stunning Angela Shepard's eyes widened in disbelief, catching but a glimpse of the yellow car before it disappeared into the traffic. "She's back?"
Virginia's heart was pounding in anticipation. If they passed the Dingo, they were close to her street— to her home. The car made a soft turn past the park where she spotted young greaser kids screaming and playing around on the swingsets and jungle gyms as she did as a child. Finally, she spotted it. The familiar pinkish blooms that ruffled its petals in the zephyrs.
