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

“Bunch of greedy shits!” Papaw announced. “When I was their age, the only thing I got from Santa was syphilis!”


“You did not!” Mama said, rolling her eyes.


“Look, Mama!” Josh said excitedly, holding up Modern Warfare III.


Noah grabbed it from his hands and pressed it against his chest as if to claim ownership.


“We don’t kill imaginary people,” Jackson said to me with a laugh.


“This better be an iPhone 5,” Mary announced as she held up a small box and shook it.


“Like I need more phone bills,” Bill said.


“Oh, Daddy,” she said wearily. “If this is not an iPhone 5, I’m going to be somad.”


“You show your ass and I’ll take a hammer to it,” Bill vowed. It wasn’t clear what the hammer would be taken to, exactly.


“It is an iPhone, isn’t it?” she said excitedly, ripping into the packaging.


Chapter 93