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

It took about three seconds for quiet to fall on the room.


I had one of those moments when I genuinely wished the earth would split apart and receive us into its fiery bowels.


The crowd in front of the Warrens parted, and Mr. and Mrs. Warren were suddenly aware of our presence. Mr. Warren got unsteadily to his feet. Onlookers gave him room.


“What are you doing here?” he asked, looking at me with undisguised contempt.


Mrs. Warren stood behind him, twisting her hands together, lips moving as if she was trying to find her voice.


“You killed my daughter!” Mr. Warren shouted.


“Harold,” said a man behind him in a calming voice.


“I will not be silenced!” he exclaimed. He shook a finger at me. “If it hadn’t been for you…I wish she’d never laid eyes on you, you dirty homosexual!”


“Harold,” the man said again, louder, more urgently, the voice of someone encouraging him not to make a fool of himself.


Chapter 71