Excerpt from Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He had his wife back, his life.

But it had cost him.

Several sessions with a couples counselor in downtown Houston—a heavyset white woman who wore way too much turquoise—had led to his decision to come off the road. At least, he thought it was his decision. It got hot in that room a lot, fairly musky with the work of excavating petty resentments only to bury them again—for good this time. And he admitted to zoning out once or twice. But they had ended their quartet of sessions—I think you guys are going to make it—with Darren agreeing to return to the Houston office of the Texas Rangers and work on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas federal and state joint task force from his desk. Monday through Friday, he parked his Chevy in front of the office, took his lunch to his narrow cubicle, and spent hours and hours rooting through digital-surveillance data on the Aryan Brotherhood. Phone and bank records. Chat-room chatter. He was a desk jockey now, home most evenings by six, depending on traffic. That Lisa didn't make him do all of this stone-cold sober made him love her a little harder. Enough, he hoped, to cover the anger he felt over her demand that he stay off the road. Not that being home was the worst.

There was beer there.

And sex.

The thing with his mother nagged at him; sure it did.

But for a while he'd managed to convince himself that Bell's motives were not so much vindictive as desperate. She was a woman on the cusp of sixty who lived alone in a rented trailer and whose only son was childless and spare in his affections, content to see his mother once a quarter, even less if he thought he could get away with it. Her boyfriend was both married and her boss, and he paid her less than minimum wage to clean toilets five days a week. She hadn't had a man to herself since she was in high school, and she bitterly resented the entire Mathews family for robbing her of the life she thought marrying Darren's father would have given her; she nursed her acrimony like a foundling pressed to her breast. The debt had now been laid at Darren's feet. He'd spent the past two months calling his mother daily, stopping by her place nearly every weekend. He cleared tufts of chickweed and bluegrass from around her trailer, swept the stairs, and cleaned the gutters without being asked, always leaving her a few hundred dollars and a case of beer on his way out.

It was a dance they were doing, this country waltz, each pretending that Darren was a son who had been waiting for just the right opportunity to take care of his aging mother, that he wasn't here now solely because she was blackmailing him. Although she never used such a crass word, and neither did he. In fact, the one time he asked her directly about the gun, she'd taken it as his way of asking to spend more time with her, going so far as to invite herself to dinner at his home in Houston, which Darren recognized for the punishment it was. Starting with her ridiculous request for clams casino and Black Forest cake, the recipes for which she actually clipped from an ancient copy of the Ladies' Home Journal she'd had since she was in high school and mailed to Lisa.

She was drunk when she showed up to their loft in downtown Houston, asking even before her coat was off where the rest of the house was. Lisa hung Bell's balding rabbit fur in the hallway closet and made a point of squeezing Darren's hand in solidarity before escorting Bell to the dining-room table. Their windows looked out on Buffalo Bayou, but Bell wasn't impressed with that either. "We got dirty water in the country too," she said as Darren pulled out her chair. Lisa wasted no time setting their first course on the table, a chilled onion soup they ate by candlelight. Darren didn't touch a drop of alcohol all night, watching as Lisa and Bell raced each other to the bottom of a bottle of drugstore chardonnay, his mother's sole offering.

Excerpted from Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke. Copyright © 2019 by Attica Locke. Excerpted by permission of Mulholland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.