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

He singled out Noah as being the child-like creature that Christ wants us all to be. He even signed during his sermon to explain special things directly to Noah that were not in his sermon


It was rather extraordinary and I was justifiably flabbergasted. After years of being treated like a shameful pariah by Father George, Father Ginderbach had actually gone out of his way to welcome Noah to his church and to include him in his sermon, treating him as if he were indeed a beloved child of God, and just as important as all the other children in the pews that day.


Noah smiled proudly. He never had a problem being the center of attention.


“Jesus made it clear that his kingdom is made of ‘such as these,’ the little ones, and that they shall see the face of God. We must never do anything to hinder the ‘such as these,’ not when they are so important to the kingdom,” the priest said.


Chapter 51