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

Better out than in, is my motto, so I let him cry and didn’t interfere. Seeing him in such pain, I cried a little too, and that’s how my mother found us about forty minutes later when she let herself in the front door to the apartment and offered a worried, anxious look.


She sat down on the recliner and Noah went to her like the little boy that he was, crawling onto her lap and throwing himself at her mercy, burying his face against her bosom.


“Of course. I’ll fix us something for dinner. When he quiets down, maybe you can give him a bath. He’s been playing with Keke all day and he’s a bit stinky.”


“You should let him bathe himself.”


“Normally I do,” I said, “but rather than just telling him you love him and care about him and you’ll be there for him during this painful, difficult period of his life, why not show him? Why not just get all kinds of extravagant with your affections and pretend like you really love him?”


Chapter 67