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 could get used to that, I thought. 65: Fireworks for Noah


In the evening after all the guests had gone, we boarded our vehicles and caravanned into downtown New Albany to watch the fireworks as we did each year.


I perched on the edge of a sidewalk as Noah sat between my legs. They were “his” fireworks, after all, as I always told him, set-off just to honor his birthday. Jackson sat on my left, Bill on my right, his boy Eli sitting between his legs. For all intents and purposes, we were three dads doing the fireworks thing.


“It was a really nice party,” I said to Bill. “Thank you.”


“He’s worth it,” Bill said, glancing at Noah.


“If you didn’t love him, you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble,” I pointed out.


“He’s a good kid,” he said, deftly sidestepping my point, which was to let him know that I understood that he really did have my child’s best interests at heart despite all his rhetoric and religious mumbo bullcrap.


Chapter 85