Buckingham Nicks A/U Series Part 4: The Dance

Prologue: We Will Never Break The Chain

Santa Monica, California
Friday , January 25, 1997
(5:30 pm)
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"Do you mean to tell me I have to negotiate menopause and this fucking traffic?"

Stevie sat in the passenger's seat as her daughter Julia drove them home from an afternoon in the city. Stevie had woken Julia up that morning and asked her if she wouldn't mind driving her into Los Angeles to the gynecologist and then she'd treat her to lunch at shopping for being a great kid. Julia had groaned and turned over in her bed, sleeping her way through her winter break from college back east with just under a week before she was due back at school, agreeing to her mother's terms and reminding her she was a great kid anyway.

"Ugh, I am so jealous of you!" Julia shouted above the Spin Doctors singing "Two Princes" on the car radio, a song she and Jodie McVie had loved a few years back, in high school. "Why can't I go through menopause so I'm not a raving lunatic once a month?"

"Because you are nineteen years old and you have your whole future in front of you, Jules." Stevie stroked her daughter's ironed-straight sandy blonde hair with the golden highlights she'd added over Thanksgiving that past year. "You have babies to make when you're ready!"

Another eye roll came from her fiercely feminist daughter. "Mom. Seriously. Jodie and I do not want any kids! Let Aaron or Sara make you a grandma, okay?"

"Well jeez, Julia, I didn't say do it now!" Stevie had to laugh at the automatic response her daughter had given. "Get a diploma from N.Y.U first and then we'll worry about all of that."

The ride was silent for awhile, until both women discovered the other was mumbling the lyrics to the song. They exchanged a smile and began to sing out loud.

"Marry him, or marry me...I'm the one who loves you, baby, can'tcha see? I ain't got no future or family tree but I know what a prince and lover ought to be, I know what a prince and lover ought to be..."

Stevie looked over at her oldest child, watched her navigate the rush hour traffic expertly and calmly. Julia Robin Buckingham had been born on April 2, 1978 in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, but she had been the calmest, sweetest, most uncomplicated child ever. She had also grown up and become an amazing friend, reminding Stevie so much of Robin sometimes that she could barely breathe.

Menopause. The word itself made it sound like it was for old people, Stevie thought. After about three years of hot flashes and night sweats and several other unpleasant symptoms, Stevie had finally asked the doctor if she was "going through the change." She would be turning forty-nine in May and according to her doctor, she was right on schedule.

She thought back to that night in 1978 when her water had broken at home and "Dreams" had begun to play on the car radio as Lindsey nervously drove them to the hospital in the middle of a storm. She thought of the agonizing labor that had ended with her son Aaron barely a year later. And she thought of her daughter Sara, who turned nine in April, and the emergency C-section that had brought her into the world because at forty years old, Stevie was a high-risk mother. Now, she thought, those days were over. It wasn't that she wanted another baby - she was way too old for that - but she'd been getting more sentimental lately thinking back on the early days with the kids.

Stevie knew the cause of her sometimes-tearful nostalgia. A few months before, out of the clear blue sky, her phone had rung on a Sunday night as she was at home watching Touched By An Angel with her daughter Sara. Kim Anderson, Robin's widower, to whom she had no spoken since he'd retuned to Minnesota to get help from his family in raising baby Matthew, was on the phone, explaining how sorry he was to have cut Stevie out of his son's life, and how at thirteen, Matthew was ready to hear all about the mother he'd never known from the women who'd known her best.