Lexicon

gripped the wheel and berated herself. What would Eliot think? He would be ashamed. He’d tell her to get used to Broken Hill, because the way she was acting, she was never coming home. She might as well buy a house and get a couple of dogs and marry Harry the paramedic and live here forever.
    “Oh, Jesus,” she said, because that was atrocious.
    • • •
    She became Pavlovian to the bell that jangled whenever someone opened the Tangled Threads door but it was never him, and after a few days she understood that it never would be. He saw the flowers for exactly what they were: an awkward, fantastical sally at romance. She felt angry at herself, and him for making her act like that. Because, to be fair, he’d caught her in the middle of a trauma. She hadn’t been herself. Who was he to judge? He was a nobody in a dinky, blow-away town and he didn’t even have a proper ambulance. And his hair was old-fashioned. The only reason she’d even looked at him twice was he had no competition. She itched for a boy to walk in, someone young and cute and stupid. She stewed behind the counter and tidied racks until everything was the same.
    At noon, she walked to the local burger place and stood in line behind the miners—not muscular guys in sleveless shirts with picks and sexy soot stains, like you might expect, but fat truck drivers and crane operators who smelled like oil. Hardly anyone actually went into the mines anymore. That part was automated. And there was hardly anything to go into: For the most part, the mines were great open-cut quarries that looked like meteorite craters. The town surrounded a huge one, separated from it by a towering wall of mullock, which was the stuff they dragged out of the ground that wasn’t worth anything but had to be put somewhere. No one seemed to find this strange, living in a town shaped like a doughnut, slowly filling the edges of the hole with crap. She wanted to ask why they didn’t move the town about five miles north, or south or east or west, for that matter, any random direction. But she could predict the response: They would say,
Because this is where it is
. Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It was refreshing and genuine but sometimes led to situations like building a town around a hole. Originally she’d thought the name Broken Hill was a joke, part of the perverse humor that led them to nickname people with red hair
Bluey
. Because besides the mullock, the place was as flat as a mirror. But apparently there had been a hill once. It had been mined away.
    She inhaled stale sweat and cigarettes until she reached the counter, then ate her burger at a table outside, watching traffic. Everything that passed she’d seen before. She turned her head, testing her neck, and saw the paramedic van parked across the road.
    She felt panic. But she was over him, remember? She had forgotten that for a second. She relaxed. She began to look for him, casually. She hoped she did see him, so she could discover exactly how plain and boring he was when he wasn’t carrying her tooth in his mouth. She ate her burger. She saw him. It might have been him. He was coming down the sidewalk, talking to a woman. He shook his head and it definitely was him. He was cute. She might have been suffering from head trauma but she did have taste. He was broad shouldered. His arms were incredible. He was not wearing a wifebeater. As he drew closer, she pegged his age at maybe twenty-five. The woman was an attractive brunette Emily had seen featured in real estate advertisements. She laughed at something Harry said, tossing her hair, and Emily was totally fine with that. Emily wished Ms. Real Estate the very best of luck with her handsome Australian paramedic.
    She almost let them walk by. Then she decided what the hell. There was no problem, so why not? “Hello.”
    He stopped. His eyes: She had forgotten those. “You’re . . .”
    “Toothless.”
    “Right.” She saw him thinking about the flowers. He
had
found that awkward.
    “Just wanted to say thanks,” she said. “Don’t let me hold you up.”
    The real estate woman smiled and snaked a hand into Harry’s. He seemed relieved that she was not turning on the crazy. “No problem.” The real estate woman began to lead him away. Suddenly he skipped back to her table and stuck out his hand. “I’m Harry.”
    She took his hand, surprised,