Dumping Billy by Olivia Goldsmith Page B

that set off her fiery hair, she looked stunning. She didn’t think of her Communion dress; she was just grateful that she didn’t have to wear one of the loopy bridesmaids’ gowns she was usually stuck in.
    Bina, at Kate’s side, looked totally Brooklyn and smelled like fear. She wore a pink dress that poofed at the skirt. Her dark brown hair was done up in lacquered swirls of French twist curls as if she were going to their senior prom. Sal, the hairdresser who had “done” both of them for the prom, had probably done Bina this time, too.
    “Is it going to be a high mass?” Kate asked, remembering her boredom at the standing, the kneeling, and the standing again in the interminable services of her youth.
    “Mass, shmass,” Bina said dismissively. She craned her neck, looking for the guys. “I’m safe during the ceremony. It’s afterward that I’m dead meat.”
    “Bina, this isn’t a firing squad. These women are your friends,” Kate tried to assure her. “You’ve known them forever. They’re not going to judge you.”
    Bina turned back to stare at Kate. “Are you kidding?” she asked in amazement. “That’s exactly what they’re going to do. That’s what friends are for.”
    “Hey, look: We got a great strategy,” Kate reminded her. “Everyone may assume that Elliot is Michael; it will take a while to straighten that out, which will distract them. If Bev opens her big mouth and calls him Michael, I can do half an hour of material to make it look like I’m embarrassed. And everyone knows Jack left. So showing up with Brice will just daze and confuse them, or maybe even blow them away. I mean, he
is
gorgeous.”
    “Yeah,” Bina agreed dispiritedly, “but he’s no Jack.” Jack had gone to Hong Kong without calling, and Bina had heard nothing from him since. Now, she looked up and down the street again. “Where are they?” she whined.
    “They’ll be here,” Kate reassured her, looking down the all too familiar Woodbine Avenue. She felt slightly dizzy, and she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or the location. Returning to Brooklyn and the old neighborhood gave her a kind of vertigo.
    “But what if they don’t show up? I’ll have to go in alone. I can hide in the back during the ceremony, but if at the reception I have to go Jackless and ringless, they’ll all want to know the reason he broke up with me, and—”
    “Bina, calm down,” Kate said with more than a bit of concern in her voice. For the past two weeks, Bina had been spending every day and almost every night alternating between Max’s and Kate’s. After a few days, Kate had remonstrated, but Bina refused to cross the bridge. “I can’t go home. Everything reminds me of him,” was Bina’s first excuse. Kate had been happy, at first, to provide Bina with a safe haven, but after four days she’d insisted that Bina call her father and mother herself and break the news. Dr. Horowitz had threatened to fly to Hong Kong right then and there to “knock that
pisher’s
block off,” but Bina had implored her father to stay in Brooklyn and had thereby kept Jack’s block safe. Mrs. Horowitz, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, remained convinced that her daughter was engaged.
    “I can’t take this,” Bina said. “I’m melting from nervous perspiration. I’ll never wear this dress again.” Kate thought that was probably a good thing. Just then, a black Lincoln Town Car pulled up and Elliot and Brice emerged.
    “You’re late,” she said in place of a greeting, but she was happy to see the two of them.
    “Well, hello to you, too.” Elliot smiled, his usual cheerfulness intact. “Who’s late?” He looked at his watch. “You said the ceremony was three o’clock. It’s two fifty-seven.”
    Kate sighed. “Being on time is late in a situation like this.”
    “Haven’t they heard of fashionably late?” Brice asked.
    “This is Brooklyn,” Kate reminded him. But as she looked both men over, she