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

I should not have taken Noah to see his mother’s release from prison. She had told me not to, had made no bones about it. I had refused to listen. I’d gotten his hopes up, and she had dashed them. Might as well have thrown a bucket of ice water in his face.


I should have known. I thought time or circumstance might have changed her mind, or just the happiness of finally getting out of prison, or…


I made toast, fixed a cup of coffee, stood at the window looking outside at Jackson Street as Tupelo got ready to face another day of heat and humidity. I thought about the impossibility of knowing what was in peoples’ hearts, of ever really knowing what they thought, or what they wanted, or why they did what they did.


Noah came to the table. He hadn’t dressed and had ugly bruises on his forehead. He sat down without checking in with me, which was not a good sign. The bones on his ribcage were clearly outlined, as if I was starving him to death.


Chapter 17