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 stared up at the ceiling and thought of the heavens beyond, that “place” where God lived.


These were weird thoughts for me. I chalked it up to the funeral, the need to make sense of what was ultimately senseless, my need to fit everything into a box and store it away in my mind


Weird as it was for a gay man, I was a father, and I loved being a father. Loved that more than anything else in my life. I would not at all mind having more kids. I wouldn’t mind getting gay-married, creating a happy home, adopting, creating a family. I wanted that more than anything else.


I was startled when my phone began to vibrate, then ring.


The man who could have made all of that possible was calling me back.


He could still make that possible, I thought.


But my finger hesitated. I was paralyzed with indecision, insecurity, fear.


I put the phone on my nightstand, not wanting to hear the message. 56: Mr. Owen has a Laugh


Chapter 75