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

“She doesn’t want anything to do with him.”


“We went down to Pearl the other day for her release. I thought maybe if she saw him…maybe she’d change her mind…maybe she’d see how great he is, how much fun he is…but she just got into her boyfriend’s car and drove off and left us standing there.”


“And you’rethe one who’s the bad parent?”


“I’m not a bad parent,” I said. “I don’t know what it is. When my nephews and my niece were born, everyone was right there, supporting them, helping them, saying yeah, it’s so awesome, pass out the cigars, let’s celebrate, we made a baby, we passed on our genes, we did our duty. But nobody passed out cigars when my baby was born. Nobody even came to the hospital except my mother. It was two weeks before my brother Billy and his wife came to the hospital to see Noah in the incubator.”


I paused, remembering that visit with a certain bitterness.


Jackson put his hand on mine, said nothing.


Chapter 33