Page 24 of The Librarians
After he leaves, Astrid does the fifteen-minutes-before-closing announcement. She, too, sounds hollow.
Hazel appears at her elbow. “Astrid, do you want to grab a drink after work?”
Astrid freezes. She does not get drinks with her colleagues. She doesn’tdo anything with anyone, really. She simply cannot make up any more stories about her fictional Swedish parents’ fictional farm in southern Sweden, a little more than a stone’s throw from Copenhagen in Denmark.
And the last time she agreed to drinks after work was with Perry. Look how that turned out.
“I—I would love to, but most restaurants will be closed by the time we get there and I don’t know any good bars.”
“We don’t need to go anywhere.”
Hazel tilts her chin at the Den of Calories and the Wall of International Snacks therein. She hasn’t dressed in anything half so luxe as what she wore her first day to work—today it’s only a white long-sleeve tee over a pair of loose-fitting jeans—but she still looks as if she stepped out of an inspiration board.
Astrid wants badly to be her friend, as she wants badly to be Jonathan’s and Sophie’s friend.
“Having a drink right here?” her voice squeaks. “Will Sophie be okay with it?”
Sophie gets off at six most days and is long gone.
Hazel is unfazed. “Text her and ask her if it’s okay for you and me to stay a little extra time to work on the donated books.”
Some portion of Astrid’s brain blares with alarm, but she obediently does as Hazel suggests. Sophie replies almost right away.
Astrid looks up from her phone. “Sophie says go ahead. She says thanks besides.”
Hazel smiles. “It’s settled, then.”
“Okay,” mumbles Astrid. Someone else must be speaking through her numb lips.
Shortly after nine p.m., Hazel slips out to H-E-B, which is five minutes away on foot, and returns with a combo tray of sushi and a bottle of screw-top white wine. She sets all the sushi on a paper plate and pours white wine into mugs.
Only after Astrid takes her first bite does she realize that she’s starving. She devours five sushi in a row before pausing to take a sip of wine. The bottle doesn’t look expensive, but the wine is brisk and delicious. She eatsanother sushi, savors the acidity of the rice, the crispiness of the tempura shrimp, the spicy smoothness of the drizzle of sriracha mayo on top.
“I don’t remember supermarket sushi being this nice.”
Hazel laughs a little. “I don’t remember supermarkets selling sushi before I moved to Singapore—at least not this one. It used to have fried chicken and mac and cheese.”
“Oh? When was that?”
“Gosh, almost a quarter century ago. I was ten when we left.”
She really shouldn’t, because if she asks Hazel personal questions, then in turn, she will be expected to reciprocate with information about herself. But the question slips past her tongue anyway. “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you move to Singapore?”
Hazel opens her purse and pulls out, from a slender case, a pair of metal chopsticks. Astrid is completely charmed. Hazel pops a sushi into her mouth. “My mom is from Singapore. She and my dad divorced, so she went back to Singapore and took me with her.”
“Was it hard, moving to another country?”
“It was. But even more than the displacement, I had a tough time dealing with my parents’ divorce.”
Astrid is amazed that she’s learning so much, so easily, about Hazel.Andthat she hasn’t put a stop to it.
“Are your parents still together?” Hazel asks.
This question Astrid can answer truthfully, so she does. “They are, but they’re hardly hashtag goals. They might as well be roommates, rather than a couple. The only thing they do together is watch the evening news, and then my dad goes off to his man cave and my mom watches her shows and plays games on her iPad.”
“Are they here in the States?”
The question is a jagged rock scoring the inside of Astrid’s skull. It takes her a while to understand that Hazel hasn’t called her bluff. She’s only wondering whether Astrid’s parents have emigrated from Sweden.
