Free Just Married! by Shirley Jump Cara Colter Page B

with pleasure.
    Right now it had one extra character.
    Amanda was there still in the too large shirt Sam had left her in this morning.
    Her friend was a huddle of misery on the couch, bare legs tucked inside the shirt, patting at her tears, her face swollen and blotchy. She was glued to a DVD. Wedding Crashers. Beside it were a number of other DVD cases, The Wedding Singer, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Four Weddings and a Funeral.
    Sam picked up the control and turned off the TV, before putting her arms around her friend. “You’ve seen some of these a dozen times,” she said gently.
    “I want to see what real love looks like!”
    “These are fantasies, not the greatest source for a reality check. You threw a piece of cake at real love this afternoon.”
    “I don’t think Charlie married me because he loves me,” Amanda whispered, forlorn.
    “What?” Sam sank down on the couch beside her, but Amanda leaped up and dashed to the washroom. She didn’t even get the door shut before she started throwing up.
    Waldo, thankfully, was so tired from his big day that he stayed curled up in his bed by the door.
    Amanda wandered back in, looking like death.
    “Amanda, this has got to stop. You are making yourself sick. Charlie loves you madly. At least talk to him.”
    “You think I’m sick because I’m upset?” Amandaasked shrilly, and then bitterly, “I guess he hasn’t managed to tell everyone in town yet.”
    Samantha felt herself go very still. Suddenly she saw Amanda getting sick and the firestorm of emotions in a different light.
    “I’m pregnant,” Amanda announced joylessly, though Sam had already figured it out. “That’s why we rushed everything, why we decided to get married so fast. And then he had to go and tell his mother at the wedding, when he had promised he wouldn’t. You know her. She’ll tell everybody.”
    It seemed to Sam everyone would know in fairly short order anyway. “Why the big secret?” she asked carefully.
    “Because I don’t want everyone in town thinking I got married because I had to,” Amanda said shakily.
    “Amanda, honey, in this day and age no one gets married because they have to.”
    “No, I guess not,” she said doubtfully, and laid her head companionably on Sam’s shoulder. “He makes me madder than anyone on earth, Sam. Is that love?”
    “You’re asking me what love is?”
    But for some reason she thought of how she had felt at Annie’s Retreat earlier today, had that moment of belief. She could picture, again, her group of friends there, their young families with them.
    And leading the charge would be the oldest of this coming generation, a little boy or girl who wouldprobably look like some delightful combination of Amanda and Charlie.
    “I could probably get an annulment,” Amanda said, and started crying again.
    Sam was no lawyer, but it seemed to her the relationship had been consummated, just not on the wedding night, and that made her uncertain how the whole annulment thing worked. Not that she thought it would be a very good idea to share that with Amanda right now.
    Instead she felt again that sense she had had in the cottage. Of one stage of life ending, and another beginning, all unfolding seamlessly according to a plan that she might not be able to predict, but that she could trust.
    “Everything is going to be all right,” Sam said, and she heard the strength and the confidence in her own voice.
    “It is?” Amanda asked.
    “Yes,” she said firmly, “it is.”
    Amanda lifted her head off her shoulder, regarded her thoughtfully. “There’s something different about you.”
    “Oh,” Sam said carelessly, “I’ve been out in the sun all day. New freckles, salt in my hair. You know.”
    Apparently Amanda didn’t know. “That’s not it,” she said before asking, her head tilted to one side, smiling, the first smile since she’d run out of the reception, “Whose shirt is that, anyway?” And thenshe squinted at the fine print that