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 water wasn’t that deep. The swimming hole had seemed huge when I was child and Bill and I went skinny-dipping here. Now it was no more than a small bend in the river with a nice sandbar to sit on.


“Which of you little shits should I drown first?” I asked, advancing on them.


They laughed. I grabbed Eli, hefted his scrawny ass into the air, and tossed him into the deeper water. Josh shrieked with glee and tried to flee, but he was next. Noah was not spared. We played serious dunk for a while, laughing and rough-housing, and it wasn’t long before they learned they had to work together if they wanted to dunk me.


I looked back at the riverbank, saw that Shelly had wandered down from the house and was no doubt “supervising.” Everyone knows that gay men can’t wait to get their hands on helpless prepubescent boys.


While I was distracted, they piled on top of me and dunked me right and proper.


“You’re worse than the kids,” Shelly observed when I finally waded ashore.


Chapter 12