Wise-cracking Wiley Cantrell is loud and roaringly outrageous -- and he needs to be to keep his deeply religious neighbors and family in the Deep South at bay. A failed writer on food stamps, Wiley works a minimum wage job and barely manages to keep himself and his deaf son, Noah, more than a stone’s throw away from Dumpster-diving. Noah was a meth baby and has the birth defects to prove it. He sees how lonely his father is and tries to help him find a boyfriend while Wiley struggles to help Noah have a relationship with his incarcerated mother, who believes the best way to feed a child is with a slingshot. No wonder Noah becomes Wiley’s biggest supporter when Boston nurse Jackson Ledbetter walks past Wiley’s cash register and sets his sugar tree on fire. Jackson falls like a wet mule wearing concrete boots for Wiley’s sense of humor. And while Wiley represents much of the best of the South, Jackson is hiding a secret that could threaten this new family in the making. When North meets South, the cultural misunderstandings are many, but so are the laughs, and the tears, but, as they say down in Dixie, it’s all good.

Shaking the Sugar Tree

The ride into New Albany was lovely. Endless trees, sugar maples, pines, oaks, their branches choked with kudzu, marched up and down the sloping hills. The woods had a mysterious, dark look. Turkey buzzards slowly circled the sky, homing in on some poor unfortunate animal that had met its end, either on the road or deep inside the forests. Yellow wildflowers crept up from the ditches. Full summer was now bearing down and the green had exploded with fury.


Noah held his hand out in the air, smiling happily.


New Albany was full of stately old homes with spiffy new ones thrown up here and there. The downtown sat next to a river that wound slowly through hills. Biking paths offered a way to escape the modern world.


Chapter 8