Page 13 of The Librarians
“Most people here think of Sweden as reindeer and snow but in the southern reaches it has a decent growing season.”
She is still speaking in her own accent and Hazel still regards her with infinite patience.
Astrid drags the words past her parched throat. “Potatoes, wheat, and sugar beet all do pretty okay there.”
Oh, God, why did no one ever tell her that she sounds like an AI reading from Wikipedia?
“What about dairy?” asks Hazel. “I seem to recall that the Scandinavian diet is fairly high in dairy.”
Astrid gulps. Not because she can’t answer the question, but because she can.
This is where she used to say that her fictional Swedish mother drinks a glass of milk every day at lunch.
And if anyone was still interested after that, she could give a mini TED talk on Swedish cheeses, especially the ones people are likely to encounter in IKEA.
“Yes, lots of dairy. Have you ever had Hush?llsost? It’s a cow’s-milk cheese and I like using it for quesadillas.”
She laughs shakily.
Hazel takes a sip from her own mug. “I’m always interested in what people eat. Do you make quesadillas as a snack or a meal?”
Holy shit. Have they moved past the question of where her parents live? Thank God. She can talk about quesadillas for days—not that she knows much about them, but she will blather on about anything now.
She opens her mouth and out comes, “Ever since I left home for college, I’ve been telling people that my parents live in southern Sweden, not far from Malmo. But that’s not true. They live—and have always lived—in a tiny little town in Iowa.”
Hazel’s eyes widen. She thinks for a moment. “May I ask why?”
Astrid wishes she had a good answer. “I lost my mind briefly—I mean, figuratively, of course.”
The southernmost counties of Iowa were hit hard by the Farm Crisis, which made her grandparents, formerly prosperous farmers, into paupers overnight and severely limited her parents’ options in life.
Her hometown has lost 40 percent of its population in her lifetime.
And in spite of being surrounded by agricultural land—or perhaps partly due to the relentless production of corn and soybean—her entire county was—and is—a food desert where most non-meat cooking has to be done with shelf-stable ingredients.
“I don’t want you to think that I was Don Draper, escaping some kind of horrible Midwestern past. I could have been any other small-town girl, leaving home for better opportunities elsewhere.”
Hazel chews slowly. She doesn’t look at all as if she’s been turned off by Astrid’s revelation, but nor is she burning with the sort of curiosity that would make Astrid feel like a monkey in a zoo. She is just waiting for Astrid to reveal more at her own pace.
So Astrid does. “I had a boyfriend in high school. We were serious—at least serious enough to plan to go to the same college. But he was a year ahead of me and two months after he left for college, he texted to break up with me—like he was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend or something.”
And she was so devastated and livid at the time, not realizing that in another decade, people wouldn’t even text to break up anymore. They would simply disappear.
“Not very grown-up of him,” says Hazel.
“No. And I had to find out from his sister that he fell head over heels for a Portuguese exchange student. Years later he would apologize, but at the time it didn’t feel like one teenage boy broke up with me, it felt like the whole world rejected me.
I became obsessed with female exchange students from Europe—they seemed to be everything I wasn’t.
“Next thing I knew, I was spending the summer before college immersed in Swedish writers and Scandinavian travel shows.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t. Showing up at college telling people I’m from a little farm outside of Malmo wasn’t bad either, to be completely honest.”
Hazel pushes up her sleeves—it’s a bit warm inside the Den of Calories. “Sounds a bit like Matthew McConaughey. Supposedly he went around for a whole year at college with an Australian accent.”
“No way!” Astrid can’t believe she doesn’t know this. “What happened after that year?”
“I think he just sat his friends down and said ‘haha, gotcha’ or something of the sort.”
Her kingdom for Matthew McConaughey’s chutzpah! Instead, she was the girl who had absolutely no idea how to unwind the lie.
“I wish I’d done that. I was so happy when I started library school in a different state, only to meet someone who used to live down the hall from me on my first day. And when I came to Austin, guess what, someone from a year ahead of me in library school got transferred here too.”
If she’d had the courage to admit her lies when she first realized their negative impact, two months into her freshman year, she might have lost some friends but she would have gained her life back.
Instead she dithered and vacillated and let a silly charade become the ever-crumbling foundation of her life.
And she’s not even in touch with anyone she met in freshman year anymore!
“Sometimes it’s easier to come clean to strangers.
” Hazel pours soy sauce over the dot of wasabi paste she’d put on her side of the paper plate and mixes the two with the tips of her gleaming travel-size chopsticks.
“You don’t need to answer if I’m being too intrusive—but I’m guessing that you also told the truth to Perry? ”
Instead of embarrassment, Astrid feels an overwhelming sense of relief: Hazel knows and she understands.
“Perry happened to strike up a conversation with me on a day when I didn’t feel like lying.
Sometimes I don’t know whether I fell in love with him or with that euphoric feeling of finally being myself for once.
For sure when he ghosted me, I didn’t just lose a guy, I lost all hope that a new, different life was still possible. ”
She exhales shakily. “Then he came back. Now he’s dead. And maybe I’m in big trouble. Is it terrible that I can’t even feel anything about his death? I just want the police to understand I had nothing to do with it.”
Ever since her interview with the police she’s felt precarious, like a Jenga stack in a room full of overactive kids.
“You’re in shock,” says Hazel firmly. “Grief will come. And when it does, you might wish you were still in shock instead. But in the meanwhile, don’t worry too much. The police will move on when they realize you were just a bystander.”
“Thank you.” Astrid suddenly feels shy. She lowers her head. “Thank you for everything.”
“It was a low-risk offer on my part, to be a pair of willing ears. For you the stakes were much higher. So I should thank you for putting your trust in me. It’s an honor.”
No one has ever said such a thing to her, that it’s a privilege to listen to her story. A warm, liquid sensation spreads inside Astrid. She stares at the paper plate of supermarket sushi and the two mugs of room-temperature wine—what a rare, beautiful sight.
In the end they manage to eat all the sushi—and share a pack of Pocky sticks from the Wall of International Snacks besides. Hazel asks if she can take the rest of the wine home.
“We’re running low on cooking wine and this will last us until I can go to 99 Ranch.”
Astrid must be a bit tipsy, because that strikes her as impossibly funny. She’s still giggling as they lock up the library. Out in the parking lot, she hugs Hazel.
Hazel giggles, too. “Are you sure you can drive home?”
“Yes. I live barely a mile away and I’ll be careful.”
Hazel makes Astrid show her the location of her condo on a map app to make sure it really is close by before she hugs Astrid again and walks away. Astrid gets in her car and reels—not from alcohol, but the realization that maybe she finally has a friend.
When she’s back home, she finds Hazel’s number from the librarians’ message group and texts, Please tell me that a new, different life is still possible for me.
Her phone buzzes almost immediately. I believe it has already begun. Good luck.