Page 21 of Beware of Hodags

Looking pleased, he moves deeper into the store and sets my now-opened items on a countertop.

It’s then that I realize this shed has a kitchenette.

Seeing my attention on his stove and array of baking items, Mirk nods.

“The graham cracker magic, along with the other baked goods and jam preserves, happens here. Do you like to bake?” he asks hopefully.

“My sister is the baker in the family. But,” I say as he deflates, “I can follow a recipe.”

“Whew! Good. Like I said, Aunt Saenathra tries to help when she can, but she has enough baking to do for her shop so it’s just easier if whoever is running the store can make things from here.

I’ll set you up with the recipes, you can work on a few today.

If you want to pick up overtime this week, we’re a little low because I haven’t hardly had the time to bake and restock.

The shop needs thirty-six dozen cookies every week. ”

“Oh gosh.” I consider his plight. “I should be able to stay a little late to catch you up...” I’ll need to text Shepard. He’s probably not going to love that we’ll have less time together than we thought.

Mirk gives me a grateful smile. “We’ll see how you feel. I hate to overwork you on day one.” He gestures around his shed, at all the goods. “We also bake and sell about fifty pies a week, until the holidays, when it’s about seven hundred pies.”

“WOW.”

“Yeah.” Mirk passes a weary hand over his face, as if just thinking about the holiday workload is exhausting.

“Thanksgiving is… I have everybody I know making pies during Thanksgiving week. But,” he shakes himself, “one day at a time. Want to see the farm?” He shoots me a knowing smile. “With a pitstop to hug puppies?”

“Oooh, yes!” But then I stop. “Aren’t I on the clock? You shouldn’t pay me to play with puppies.”

He shrugs. “The puppies need socializing.”

I perk up. “Are you selling the puppies?”

“I am.” He glances to a calendar on the wall. “In about a week, they’ll be ready for new homes.”

“Can the pups come to the gift shop and hang with me? People love puppies, and it would be free advertising. The puppies will probably sell themselves.”

Mirk considers it. “Because we sell food, I don’t know if we can have them inside the gift shop. But I’ll see about putting up a fence beside the shop so customers can visit them.”

“Neat,” I say, beginning to grin. “I needed good news after bog spiders.”

He winces. “Sorry about that.”

I wave my hands. “It’s totally cool that my coworkers have eight legs and can walk all over me without recourse.”

Mirk huffs a laugh. “That’s not—”

“Where do you even get that many? Is there a Spiders-R-Us or something?” There’s naked horror leaking into my voice that I can’t disguise.

He laughs. “No—well, there are places that sell wolf spiders in bulk—”

My mind scrambles in arachnophobic panic.

“But I caught mine. Not all of them. Luckily, I live next to the woods,” he gestures in that frightening direction, “and so they just pour out on their own, mostly. I gathered a nice starter batch though.”

My skin. It’s going to crawl right off my body. “How do you catch them?”

“You hunt them in the dark. A wolf spider's eyes are reflective. If you grab a headlamp, or if any light source is aimed down at the ground at about a forty-five-degree angle, their eyes light up like gemstones.”

I shudder.

Mirk’s mouth tugs up into a lopsided smile. “I wanted to show you the marshes, but since you might need a little time to acclimate to our eight-legged assistants, let’s tour the blueberries.”

“You have blueberries too?” I ask. Then I remember his farm’s welcome sign, the one with the ugly wolf next to a cranberry and a blueberry. That’s making more sense now.

“You betcha. Harvest season just ended, which…” he adds to himself, bringing his hand up to cover the top of his head like he’s taking mental note, “means we won’t need to restock the sports drinks when we sell out.

” He raises and drops his shoulder and glances back at me.

“Not that we have many left. It’s always hot during harvest time but this year was, for us at least, a scorcher.

There’s very little shade even though the hedges are so tall and customers came to the store in droves for water and sports drinks.

” He steps around a planter with Glory Lilies, their bi-colored blooms fire yellow on the bottoms and scarlet red at the tops.

Like hodag eyes. I smile distractedly to myself. I should buy one for Shepard. I could put them in a hodag-green pot next to the door of the cabin.

I refocus on what Mirk just said, curious. “Blueberries are tall…?” I wonder aloud as I trail after him. But he only walks me back about an acre before I see what he means .

Rather than knee high bushes spaced neatly apart, imposing hedges soar eight, nine, ten feet—and they must be half that in depth. Rather than separate bunches of plants, they’ve been allowed to grow together so that a person can’t pass through them.

Like he said, they’re freaking blueberry hedges. And they’re tall.

I stare in awe. “I didn’t know blueberries could grow into small trees.”

Mirk looks back at me from over his shoulder.

“Oh yeah. About forty years ago, as a diversification strategy, my grandfather planted all of these hoping a U-Pick operation would better help keep the farm afloat. It was a good investment. The cranberry marsh is our fall revenue and the blueberries get us through the summer. And the gift shop takes care of us through the holidays. The hard months are January through June.”

I make a noncommittal noise and follow him as he leads me past berry hedgerow after berry hedgerow. Some of the rows have netting over them. A lot of it.

“The netting is to keep them safe from birds?”

He snorts. “It’s supposed to.” He lifts a shoulder dully. “It helps. Birds can still pick a hedge clean. A fleet of snakes is employed here to keep them at bay but—” His eyes widen and he shoots me an alarmed glance. “Mostly ones made of rubber. Customers would not appreciate seeing real snakes.”

“Snakes and spiders. You’re really something.”

“You have no idea,” he sighs. “Anyway, every season I hire some friends and distant family to patrol hedges and scare the birds off but you probably won’t see them.”

“Do your parents or family live nearby?”

“No. My… my family was messed up,” he says haltingly, coming to a slow stop in the middle of the blueberry hedges. His lips twist. “My grandmother… ”

“The one you’re named after?” I ask gently because it’s obvious there’s something unpleasant here. “Actually, sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” I start to say.

But he’s already answering. “Yes.” His eyes lower.

His lips compress. “My family has a genetic issue. You know how full-blown hemophiliacs tend to be men, while women tend to be either asymptomatic or symptomatic carriers? It’s kind of like that but the other way.

Women in my family have a genetic tendency that the men don't typically have.”

“Oh no. Your family suffers from a kind of disorder?”

He sits with that for a few protracted seconds.

“Yeah. You could call it that.” And then he looks me right in the eye and says, “She killed her husband. My grandfather,” he clarifies without emotion or heat.

He delivers his next words just as tonelessly, rapidly too, like he’s pulling off a band-aid.

“Then she murdered her son.” He swallows hard.

“My dad. My—my mom fought back, and she succeeded in mortally wounding my grandmother, but my mom soon succumbed to her injuries. I was at school. I rode the bus that morning, secure in having a happy family. When I stepped off the bus that day, I was an orphan. Of course, I didn’t know that until I walked inside the house. ”

“Oh my GOODNESS,” I exclaim, just horrified. I tell myself not to Google news articles for this gruesome story. “Mirk! I’m so… sorry…” I don’t know what else to say.

He nods, eyes downcast. “Thanks.” His voice cracks on the word and he steps back, clearing his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing hard. “Let's see some puppies.”

Dumbstruck, I follow him, afraid of blurting out something insensitive, yet equally afraid of not giving him any words of comfort at all. Sorry is too inadequate for what he just shared but I literally cannot think of anything else that is safe to utter.

Silently he leads me to their pen, and if I’m a little overly enthusiastic in greeting the thrilled puppies, he doesn’t call me on it and the puppies sure don't mind .

He holds Topanga, stroking her as he opens the gate, and calls the puppies out. “They’ll follow us,” he says, and he starts walking for a nearby shed so I follow him—and like he predicted, the puppies trip after us, yipping and making me smile.

Mirk sets down Topanga and retrieves a sturdy travel puppy pen from the shed.

Then he moves for the store. I keep the frolicking puppies busy (and far away from the line of potted chrysanthemums, which is what they all want to bite) while he fashions the equivalent of a McDonald’s kid play place, but for puppies.

“Back to business,” he says as he sets corrugated metal panels against and on top of the pen’s panels to create shady areas.

“Customers will probably stop by to ask about the blueberry season. There’s always a couple people who hope they haven’t missed it even though they’re two months late.

You can tell them that it usually ends in August. Although,” he says with a shrug, “this year we were still welcoming people almost two weeks into September—but that’s rare.

” His brows have slid up like it’s very rare.

“You can tell interested parties that, Lord willing, we’ll get a great crop next summer too and we’ll open up as soon as the first hedge ripens. ”