Say You Will Part 2: The Tour

I Am Older Now But I Still Remember

Frankfurt, Germany & Kent, England
Saturday, November 8, 2003
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Christine McVie zipped closed the front of the jacket of her Addidas warm-up suit before picking up her cell phone, her cup of tea and her copy of the London Times to head out to the deck overlooking her rose garden. She had promised Stevie she would take her call once she was settled in her hotel room in Frankfurt, knowing that she had a lot she needed to talk about and she couldn't really explain it properly to anyone else. Christine sat down at the glass table and lit a cigarette, then sipped her tea and thought of how many times in the past six years since she'd left Fleetwood Mac when Stevie's phone call to her during her morning routine overlooking the rose garden had dragged her back into the thick of things, the drama being one of the main reasons why she'd retired from touring in the first place.

Her cell phone rang and she flipped it open, assuming it was Stevie. Instead, she heard a male voice on the other end of the call. "Aunt Chris? Do you have a minute?" It was her nephew, Dan Perfect, with whom she was gutting and remodeling a farmhouse in Kent.

"Not really, love, I'm actually expecting a call from Stevie Nicks," Christine said. She took a long drag on he cigarette. "Is there anything wrong?"

"No, just wanted to know if you were planning on swinging by the property today," said Dan, who, from the sound of things, was calling from his car.

"Not until Monday, hon," Christine said. "Listen, I'll talk to you later, okay? I really don't want to miss this call from Stevie."

"Lindsey drama?" Dan asked with a laugh.

"Is there any other kind?" Christine shared a laugh with her nephew; she'd confided a lot about Fleetwood Mac in him during the time they'd spent on their joint renovation project, and he knew all about what Stevie and Lindsey were going through.

"I'll talk to you later, Aunt Chris. Love you."

"Love you too, hon." And she ended the call.

Stevie's voice had sounded strange on the phone the last time they'd spoken, which was right before she'd left for the airport to come to Germany for the European leg of the tour. She'd sounded detached, worn out, almost the way she had sounded through eight years of taking higher and higher doses of klonopin until she didn't even sound like Stevie anymore.

"I'll call you during your rose garden time," Stevie had told her. "I'll be awake...apparently I don't sleep at all anymore, and if I need to start taking sleeping pills I'm sending Kristen Buckingham the pharmacy bills...not that she knows how to GET to a pharmacy, I guess, judging from her ability to obtain proper birth control."

Christine recalled a conversation she'd had with Stevie sitting in the very chair she was sitting in now, at this very table, just about a year ago when Stevie had admitted to her affair with Lindsey. She had imagined the situation would dissolve into chaos but not like this...and while she knew, of course, that what Stevie and Lindsey were doing was technically wrong - it was adultery, after all - she couldn't help but lose what little respect she'd had for Kristen Buckingham. She had told Stevie decades ago, as they'd sat cross-legged on a hotel bed in Minneapolis with a blizzard raging outside the windows and a blizzard raging inside in the form of a mountain of cocaine dumped onto a mirror between them, that she'd always believed the worst thing a woman could do to a man was to trap him with an accidental pregnancy that wasn't accidental at all. They'd been discussing Stevie's choice not to carry the baby she'd conceived with Don Henley to term, and how she'd heard from J.D. Souther that Glenn Frey had asked Don to make sure her pregnancy was not an attempt to extract a marriage proposal from him...