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

If I thought life had been hard up to that point, I had been sorely mistaken.


Like many meth babies, Noah was insecure, fearful, restless, had the attention span of a tomato plant. Learning disabilities followed, clinging, separation anxiety, a tendency to darkness and depression, and sometimes a wild, uncontrolled self-destructive rage. Coupled with his deafness, it was a potent brew to swallow. Only now, with about ten years under his belt, was he starting to settle down, though he was constantly fearful of separation and checked in with me many times each day to make sure I was still there. I could be sitting on the toilet and he’d wander in, wanting to know where I was, wanting to reassure himself. At least he had gotten to the point where he could sleep through the night without waking up and coming to my room and climbing into my bed, although he still did that from time to time.


Chapter 25