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 banged through the door on the porch and found him reaching into the back of his truck for a beer. I threw myself at him, wild, uncontrolled, furious, out of my mind. I pounded at his back with my fists.


It took him about all of ten seconds to have me flat on my back on the boards of the porch while he perched on my chest, holding my wrists so I couldn’t strike him. I threw my weight around, trying to dislodge him off my chest, shouting at him to get off.


He merely glared at me the way he did when we were little and we both knew that he had nothing to worry about from me.


Tears sprang to my eyes. A huge blackness seemed to fall down from the sky on top of me, smothering me with the pointlessness of it all. Nothing I ever did would please these people.


He got off and held out his hand, which I ignored.


Noah crouched down at my side, a frantic look in his eyes.


“You better tend to him, Mama,” Bill said.


Chapter 57