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

Noah wore a huge gin as he wandered over to where Jackson and I sat. He showed us his present from his Uncle Bill and Aunt Shelly: Dance Central III for the Xbox.


Now we can dance,Jackson signed happily to him.


Why don’t you get our present for your Memaw?Jackson suggested.


Noah hurried to the tree and scrounged around, returning with a carefully wrapped package for my mother.


“Well, thank you,” Mama said to him as she sat down and opened it.


“What did you get her?” I whispered.


It was a nice picture frame, which was also carefully wrapped in tissue paper.


Mama removed the paper to find a portrait of Jackson, Noah, and myself. It was based on pictures we’d taken in the photo machine at the mall, all of us crammed into the box and laughing goofily. Jackson had taken one of those tiny photos to a print shop and had it turned into an eight-by-ten that had been colorized with an art filter.


Chapter 94