Father of the Bride

Amanda

After Daryn had gone to bed Amanda sat alone on the leather sectional, gazing out at Central Park.

Absently, she picked up the photograph of Amelia from the end table. Her granddaughter was gorgeous, something she found both odious and déclassé somehow. True beauty, she had maintained, was not something you were born with but something you bought on Park Avenue.

To say that Amelia favored her father was understatement. She had not a smidge of her mother in her.

In the picture Daryn strained on tiptoes to kiss his teenage daughter on the forehead. Amanda shook her head in disapproval.

And the girl not even in heels, she winced.

She was getting nowhere. So, she decided to go to bed.

As Amanda passed her granddaughter's room she noticed the door was slightly ajar so she glanced in.

Daryn lay snuggled in Amelia's fluffy bed, probably she decided off in Never-Never land playing with the other Lost Boys. He looked quite at home in a room that was still delightfully girlish for someone about to be married.

In the dim light from the door anyone would have mistaken the father for his daughter.

Once in bed, Amanda lay atop the covers, trying to come up with some fabrication that could possibly account for Amelia and Andrea's absence so proximate to the wedding.

"Damn these hot flashes."

Even in her nightgown alone, Amanda was roasting. In such a state she couldn't possibly be expected to come up with a workable solution.

She walked directly to the bathroom and up to the medicine cabinet she had already claimed as her own. It overflowed with a plethora of uppers and downers and other essentials, all of them prescribed and potent.

"There you are." She undid the childproof cap, popped one of the purple lozenges into her month, and gulped it down with a swig of tap water.

They helped a little. But she'd have to get her Dr. Gold to up the dosage yet again.

Amanda stared at the ordinary vial in her hand something tickling the back of her mind like a sneeze that wouldn't come.

What was it Dr. Gold had explained?

Estradiol was a manufactured estrogen—the most potent of the female hormones. It helped a menopausal woman–maintaining her breasts, keeping her from growing a beard, giving her curves and keeping her soft.

"I wonder..." Amanda mused. I wonder if it would work on say a husband?