Everybody Loves You

She Was So Enticed By His Smile (Stevie's Story)

Santa Monica, California
Monday, January 9, 2023
(7:30 am)
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"Do you want to hear what I have prepared?"

That was what Mick said to me when he called me on the morning of Christine's memorial service. It's funny using the term "morning of" when, for me, it was more like "the night before." I've been going to sleep at eight in the morning and waking up at two or three in the afternoon for years now, and I still sometimes forget when talking others that for them, it was morning. It was morning to Mick, most likely standing outside on the deck of his house in Maui overlooking the ocean as the sun rose, probably holding a cup of coffee from Fleetwood Coffee as he spoke to me. I could picture him doing just that, too. For some reason, after forty-six years, I can only picture Mick Fleetwood with the backdrop of Hawaii in my mind...probably because it was that very backdrop around us in 1977, the first time he kissed me. We spent the night together that night, neither of us concerned during that trip that he was still married to Jenny, and Don Henley was still sending lier jets to pick me up to be with him on tour.

He was asking if I wanted to hear the eulogy he'd written for Christine's memorial service. I didn't particularly want to hear it - not because it would be bad, but because if I heard it, this would all be real and that would be too much.

Christine McVie had been dead exactly forty days. Lindsey had told me years before that forty days is the exact amount of time people mourn loss in Islam, and somehow, that was where my mind went that morning. To Lindsey. It still did, and I was beginning to think it always would.

I wasn't about to hurt Mick's feelings or make him feel weird, so I said, "I'll hear it when you get up there tomorrow, Mick...and I'm sure it's amazing."

"You mean today, Stevie," he reminded me. "Some people go to sleep before it's light out, know."

The thing about Mick Fleetwood's smile is that you could hear it sometimes, like when you're on the phone or in the next room and he's talking to you...and I could hear him smiling then. It was a combination of good-natured ribbing at my sleeping pattern and being in love with me.

Oh yeah. I forgot to open with that.

Mick and I were standing on the beach outside his house in Maui on New Years Eve on our way to getting as pleasantly hammered as two people in their seventies could when he told me he loved me. At first I didn't get it; I was like, "Love you too, hon." You know, like friendship. Like we'd been for years.

But he meant it. He wrapped me up in his arms and I didn't fight him - mostly because he's so big and I'm so tiny and it was warm in his arms in the cold air on the beach - and he told me something I'll never forget.

"If losing Chris has taught me anything it's that none of us are thirty anymore, Stevie. Our time is limited, and I refuse to go into 2023 without at least trying to make my dream come true if that's the case. I love you, Stevie. Not as a friend...although you are the best friend I've ever had."

"What about John?" I asked him, quaking in my six-inch-heeled boots because I had no idea how to respond. "Isn't John your best friend?"

I was handling it wrong. But my God, I was nervous! I was totally ambushed and I wasn't sure if I liked that. It was either a sneak attack by a drunken musician or the sweet, romantic declaration of love I'd missed out on in 1977 when he and I recovered from our month-long fever dream and held hands on the plane all the way home to L.A. and said goodbye without words just before Jim Recor called me up and told me his wife, Sara, had packed a bag and moved in with Mick.

Spoiler, guys: Mick Fleetwood is the "great dark wing" with whom I had "met my match." However, the song is not about Sara Recor. (Sorry, honey, if you are reading this. The poet in my heart is a whole different thing.)