Big If [antikvár]

1 Center Effing is a town between the ocean and 1-95, on the old and settled seaboard of New Hampshire. To the north is salt marsh. To the south is salt marsh, four square miles of state forest, and the town of Rye. It has a bit of money now, high tech and retirees, condos on the beaches and a new downtown. It was different twenty years ago when Vi Asplund was growing up. In those days, Center Effing was a town of lobstermen, dads commuting into Portsmouth, and, of course, the Air Force out of Pease. The house where Vi grew up was your basic saltbox. New Hampshire's answer to the ranch. The house was on a quarter acre down Santasket Road, three bedrooms on the second floor, an attic and a basement and a small attached garage, with views of nothing special—on one side, Captain Cooper's house (saltbox, painted gray); on the other. Major Buckert's (saltbox, painted gray and briefly a bright orange just before the Buckerts filed for divorce). These men—Cooper, Buckert—^were SAC pilots based at Pease, nine miles up the interstate. The bomber dads were gone six months of the year, deployed to forward-ready status in Thüle, Greenland, and when they were away, their families always went a little crazy on the street. The older kids set fires, the younger kids went naked, the mothers took lovers (other bomber pilots, waiting to deploy). The lovers came and went in the hours before dawn and the Asplunds had a view of this as well, the craziness, the lovers, and the kids. The front windows of the Asplunds' house overlooked a rather ordinary lawn, twin Rose of Sharon bushes and a boxwood hedge, and past Santasket Road to the wavy pampas of the intertidal marsh. Behind the house was a patio and yard, a swing set and a garden where Vi's mother, Evelyn, a sun-brown housewife, grew very 1 ^