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

“And you’re complicated,” he added. “I like that. Most guys would have been into my pants by now and gone about their business and I’d never see them again. I can’t seem to get you into my pants at all.”


“What would I do if I was in your pants?”


I nodded because yeah, I certainly would.


“But I don’t just want you to get into my pants,” he said. “I want you to get into my life.”


I frowned, not sure what to make of that.


Noah, who had finished eating, looked up.


We can look, but we don’t have any money today,I signed, wiping more tomato sauce off his chin


There was a game arcade in the corner of the cafeteria next to where we sat. He always spent some time there after we ate.


Chapter 32