Summary

Part One of Heaven, My Home, contains four chapters and, like the following three parts, is told from third-person, limited-omniscient, past-tense perspective. The narrator begins by describing the state of Darren Matthew's life leading up to the night that he broke into his mother's trailer. Since wrapping up his work in Lark, Texas -- covered in the preceding novel, Bluebird, Bluebird -- Darren and his wife Lisa had enjoyed relative peace in their marriage. Lisa had not commented on the few beers Darren drank a week, and their home life "stabilized...by the simple pleasure of good sex, by its power to pluck out the best memories of a marriage and make you forget the ugly ones" (13). In the background was their shared understanding that Darren had nearly left Lisa in Houston permanently, favoring instead the solitude on "the land of...