Say You Will Part 1: Destiny Rules

You Can Dedicate Your Pain To Him

Brentwood & Santa Monica, California
Thursday, May 23, 2002 (Evening)
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It had been John's idea to get the kids singing in the background at the end of "Say You Will".

Molly McVie was thirteen years old now and looked a great deal like her father had looked in his youth, the wild and hard-partying days of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, back when he and Mick hung on Peter's every word even as they got more and more bizarre and distant and fueled by LSD an a metal illness that was probably bipolar disorder except that in 1960s London, who knew? Molly had expressed and interest in coming to to studio to check out the action and also spend some time with Aunt Stevie, the coolest adult on the planet according to Molly. Stevie had run with the idea immediately and called Lori to ask if Jessi could come down to the studio and keep Molly company while adults talked about boring stuff, and within about an hour's worth of phone calls it had been decided that Kelly Anne, who'd been staying with Stevie on and off since she was fourteen and never stopped looking for opportunities to document life events on camera, would transport Jessica Nicks and her best friend, Maddy Felsch, to the studio on Friday after school on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend, and Julie McVie would do the same with her daughter, and the girls would get to put on headphones and sing into microphones and record background vocals of the chorus of "Say You Will" and really get to be on the record. Jessi and Maddy, who were eleven years old, jumped at the idea as quickly as Molly had, and John's brilliant idea was going to make for a fun afternoon and a fantastic addition to the song.

Lindsey had no idea why this meant that Kristen had to show up with Will and LeeLee and stay the entire time...

"It's a family day," Kristen had explained to him that night, loading the dishwasher as she spoke as LeeLee sat in her booster seat at the kitchen table and sloppily worked her way through an Oreo Lindsey had given her after dinner. The sound of Will on the floor of the living room nearby making his X-Men figures fight over an episode of Spongebob Squarepants on the Cartoon Network hovered in the background, and Lindsey was still reeling from his emotionally charged conversation - and kisses - with Stevie in the pantry at the "Say You Will" house a few hours ago, wondering how the hell fate had worked it out so that it wasn't Stevie loading the dishwasher while the kids watched the Spongebob show and made a brown, sticky mess out of a cookie at the kitchen table.

"I mean, I guess you could call it that, but it's not a free-for-all or a kids' birthday party here, Kit, it's three young girls singing background vocals."

"It's Stevie trying to glom onto family time when she's childless by bringing in her brother's kid like she's hers and John being too nice, as usual, to say she's stolen his idea," Kristen said lazily, almost like it was self-evident, as she wiped her hands on a dishtowel with lemons printed on it and rolled her eyes. Her comments against Stevie had started after Will was born, when Stevie had seen his for the first time on Lindsey's forty-ninth birthday. Stevie had come over with an armful of baby gifts, a birthday gift, a gift certificate for a spa day for new mother Kristen, and she'd held newborn Will securely in her arms and remarked at how much he resembled his father and called him "Little Linds", and she'd sung him to sleep with "Beautiful Boy" by John Lennon and declared that to be his nickname from there on out. Kristen had called her actions phony, told Lindsey she was trying too hard to accept it all after she'd lost out, and Lindsey had told her that those over-the-top gestures were very real and what made Stevie Stevie...and he'd fallen asleep beside her that night actually hating her for the first time and finding himself suddenly desperate to build some kind of impenetrable force field around Stevie to shield her from the horrendous pain he knew she'd been in when she'd held his child with another woman in her arms and presented him with a baby blue blanket she'd crocheted herself.