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 wiped at my eyes and turned away from him.


“I don’t know what I’d do if someone took my child away from me,” I said.


“They can’t do that,” Jackson pointed out.


“They can’t hang black people from magnolia trees either, but that never stopped them, did it?” I countered. “You can’t own another human being. You can’t go out in the slave quarters at night and rape your female slaves so you can make a bunch of little baby slaves. You can’t burn crosses in people’s yards. You can’t torch their businesses or set people on fire. Don’t tell me about what folks can and cannot do.”


He did not seem to know what to make of this.


“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be sitting here and running my mouth like a fool.”


“You ever heard of something called gay rights?” he asked.


“Maybe they don’t exist down here yet, but they’re coming,” he said.


“What’s that got to do with anything?”


Chapter 34