Florie
Daniel was a poet.
How she’d met him was an actual miracle.
“Don’t be childish,” Selma had whispered. “Look at all the people here. Daniel Martin is a star.”
Daniel Martin walked onstage. And she saw.
The poet was older than Florie. Perhaps twenty-five. He was a gorgeous and perfectly poetic-looking man with shaggy black hair, black eyes as quick and cunning as a raven’s, olive skin, and a sensuous mouth.
Daniel Martin stood at the podium, cleared his throat, and said, “Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming tonight.”
He looked right at Florie as he spoke and for a precious few seconds he didn’t look away. She was surprised that smoke didn’t surge from the lightning bolt of their encounter.
For over thirty minutes, Daniel read his poems. Florie had no idea what they were about. She didn’t hear the words. She was floating on the deep baritone flood of his voice. He was singing a love song to her. He was calling to her, wrapping her in desire.
After his reading, Daniel sat at a table and signed his books. Florie shyly approached him, her hands trembling as she held her book out. Her mind was strobing with images from concerts where girls had stars sign their arms—or the tops of their breasts.
Once again Daniel’s eyes met hers. Her breath caught in her throat.
He asked, “May I have your name?”
She was so stunned at the question, so elated, for a moment she couldn’t remember her own name.
Selma nudged Florie’s arm. “Who do you want him to sign it to?”
Florie blushed. “Oh. Sorry. My name is Florie. Well, it’s Florence, but everyone calls me Florie. Spelled F-l-o-r-i-e.” She was talking too much! She almost clasped her hand over her mouth.
“Thanks, Florie.” The poet bent his head and scribbled quickly on the title page of the book.
Florie thanked him, her voice so light she wasn’t sure he heard her. She and Selma left the line and walked toward the doors.
“Wait,” Florie said. She needed a moment. Something enormous had happened and she couldn’t leave this space so quickly.
She opened the book. Daniel had written: Florie, will you have a drink with me after I finish signing?
She thought she would rise like a helium balloon up to the ceiling.
“Look,” she whispered to Selma, showing her the book.
She’d had a drink with Daniel that evening and the next day she’d had lunch with him and the day after that she’d had dinner with him, and the night after that she’d slept in his bed on the third floor of his apartment in a slightly timeworn double-decker near Comm Ave.
Daniel was twenty-five and already a respected poet.
His book of poems, Celebrations for the Working Man, had won praise from poetry magazines and a tenure-track spot at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
After this semester of teaching at BU, Daniel was returning to his hometown of Milwaukee, where he would teach at the university there and work on a new book.
Daniel had grown up in a large family on a dairy farm outside of Milwaukee.
The Martins had lived in that area for generations, and there were a lot of Martins.
Down the road, Daniel’s uncle and his family tended apple orchards, rows and rows of Christmas evergreen trees, and fields and fields of oats, which had grown in popularity when it was announced that unlike wheat, oats were gluten free.
Daniel had earned money working on the farm, but he did so well at school that his family sent him to college in Milwaukee.
When his first poem was chosen to be in the New Midwestern Poets, Volume Six, his family knew he should follow his calling.
He worked on the farm in the summer, studied in the winter, and wrote poetry all the time, corresponding with other writers and poets and traveling to attend poetry conferences.
He had told Florie that when his first book of poetry won a national prize, he’d had a number of girlfriends and even some groupies, but when he met Florie, everything changed.
He knew he wanted to be with her all his life.
He took her home with him over Thanksgiving, where she was enchanted by the large farmhouse, the noisy family, the aroma of fresh apple pie, and the startling scope of the Martins’ land.
Wisconsin, she learned, ranged over sixty-five thousand square miles of land.
Nantucket contained forty-eight square miles.
Milwaukee was on the shore of Lake Michigan. People could swim, sail, kayak, or take river tours on the three abiding rivers.
Daniel was becoming known as “the Poet of the Midwest.” He was compared to Carl Sandburg, who wrote about the steel industries and the people who worked there. Daniel’s next project was writing an epic poem about Milwaukee’s history as the city progressed toward the future.
Florie had known from their first date that Daniel was moving back to Milwaukee in the spring, and that he would be there for years.
And she’d known that if she wanted to be with him, she would have to make the move, too.
And that worried her. She’d always assumed she’d live somewhere near Nantucket.
With her business degree, she could get a job for one of the international corporations in Boston.
But living so far away from her own family and state, living where snow smothered the landscape in the winter months and she couldn’t tell the time of day by the blast of a ferry’s horn—she wasn’t sure she could handle that.
Plus—would it be a mistake to follow him? When Daniel talked about the future, he always said we. And he had told her that he loved her. She knew she loved him.
But really? Did he really love her? Did he want a future with her? Daniel acted as if they were a couple. He’d mentioned several businesses in Milwaukee where she might want to work.
But was that enough?
Florie had lived her life as the middle and absolutely not ignored child of an important Nantucket family.
Her younger brother, the precious male, Lucas, was going to take over the Parsons Insurance Company.
Lydia was going to be whatever she wanted to be because Lydia was fabulous.
And Florie was going to get a degree in business management because then she could, she hoped, find a job with some important company in Boston…
a company so significant that it had international offices.
It had always bothered her that she’d never traveled through Europe like her best friend Mabel had.
Florie wanted to drink Pernod at a sidewalk café on the Left Bank of Paris while smoking a pink Sobranie.
She wanted to pose with the lions in Trafalgar Square and lean on a bridge overlooking the Thames in London.
And Italy! Did she want to see Florence or Venice or Rome first?
All of those cities and the countryside, too.
If she got a good job with Moderna or Toast or Merck, she could be posted somewhere in Europe, or anywhere in the world, really.
She hadn’t planned on meeting Daniel.
Daniel had taken the tenure-track position at the University of Milwaukee, and he wanted Florie to come with him. It was all so confusing. She loved Daniel more than life itself, but Milwaukee was so far away from Nantucket, and much more than an ocean away from Europe.
But love was wider and brighter than all the world. Whenever she saw Daniel, he was the only place on earth she wanted to be.
On Thanksgiving, he’d taken her to meet his parents.
This weekend she was taking him to meet not only her parents but her entire family, especially her grandfather.
Florie adored her grandfather Brick Jr. She just knew she was his favorite and when she was little, walking down Main Street with him to get an ice-cream cone at Nantucket Pharmacy, she felt so proud she could burst. He’d given her his own mother’s string of pearls when Florie graduated from high school.
She wanted to make him proud of her. And she wanted him to live forever.
Friday night, the entire family would get together for dinner.
She would introduce Daniel to them then.
She was sure Daniel would love their home and the Stroll—who wouldn’t?
The cobblestone streets and the shops extravagant with Christmas decorations brightened everyone’s heart.
It was like walking through a Dickens book but without mean people.
The Stroll was her favorite event of the year, even better than her birthday or Christmas.
Everyone came for the Stroll, not just the townsfolk but off-islanders, too, and for a few days it seemed that the world was all absolutely perfect.
The stars in the sky seemed to radiate excitement.
The air was full of hope drifting around like the smallest, most delicate snowflakes.
It was about Christmas, but just as much about happiness, as if they were all neighbors, celebrating the brightness of life.
Oh, she couldn’t wait for Daniel to come for the Stroll!