Buckingham Nicks A/U Series: That's What Love Is All About

Knowing We Can Reach The Other Side (Wedding Week, Part One)

Birmingham, England
Monday, December 9, 2024
(8:00 pm)
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"You can dance if you want to...You can leave your friends behind...'Cause your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, well they're no friends of mine..."

Childhood nostalgia had overtaken the children of Fleetwood Mac.

It was Aaron who'd been flipping through YouTube music on the television in the den of the home he and Olivia had rented out for what they were called Wedding Week Gone Wild, and his search had led him to a video including fifty pop songs of the 1980s, all of which he and Olivia, as well as Julia and Jodie, had all been very familiar with when they were kids. Julia reminded her brother of the dance the four of them had made up to "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats, which had just begun to play after a Michael Jackson song, and the siblings needed only a brief glance at each other in confirmation that they were each thinking what they were thinking...and immediately jumped up to begin their dance routine.

"Get up here, Liv...you can dance if you want to!" Aaron joked to his fiancé, who sat beside her older brother on the green velvet couch that looked a lot like the one Aunt Stevie had when they were younger, back when they had the Venice Beach house and she and Jodie would sleep over on Friday nights and watch Full House. Olivia shrugged and rose from her seat, and pulled Jodie along with her.

"You're in this with us, Jodie," she said, pushing him out to the middle of the floor to join in the dance routine that, once upon a time, the four kids had performed for their parents for the old VHS video camera. Three of the four parents sat around the den that night as well, and for the first time in over thirty years, the four oldest children of Fleetwood Mac began to perform their "Safety Dance".

Stevie sat beside her husband on the sofa on the other side of the room, watching Julia dance beside Jodie and thinking of how proud she was of the way her daughter had been handling things with Jodie since the wedding date had approached. After their altercation on the Fourth of July, Julia had explained to her the day after Lindsey's birthday dinner, Jodie had called to apologize for showing up unannounced at the barbecue and she'd agreed to go out to dinner to discuss ways to remain in each other's lives for Stephanie and John, as well as for the peace of their extended family.

"You're not going to believe this, Jules," Stevie had told her on the phone, "but your dad actually told me last night that his birthday wish - you know, with the candles - was that everyone in our family have peace. That includes you too, kid. You definitely deserve some peace in your life after this year...and quite frankly, so does Jodie." The initial anger Stevie had felt towards her son-in-law for hurting her daughter had dissipated with time, and with memories of the old days, when the kids were still babies and the band was recording Tusk, when she'd told Christine she'd always love Jodie and Olivia as if they were her own children.

"I agree," Julia said. "We're going out to dinner on Sunday night to see if we can be civil with each other for a whole meal, and if that works out, the four of us will go out the weekend after that - Jodie and me and Steph and John, I mean. Like family."

"I don't care if you're a middle-aged woman now and not a little girl anymore, and I'm just going to say it...I'm proud of you, Julia." Stevie breathed a sigh of relief at her daughter's news. "Being the bigger person is not easy, but you have been able to do it all your life...I'd hate to see you lose that now, with the stakes being so high."

And the bigger person was exactly what Julia had been trying to be ever since, Stevie acknowledged, and, for what it was worth, so was Jodie. The anger and shouting and "fuck you" being a substitute for conversation had stopped, and for the sake of their family, they were getting along. They were both dancing in the middle of the den to "Safety Dance" as they had in her living room forty years before, and everyone in the room was laughing and having fun. Stevie was watching the dance routine unfold with a smile on her face as Lindsey sat beside her and recorded it on his phone, and the only thing that threatened her happiness was the looming thought she'd had at every family occasion since November 30, 2022...