there. Or even better, you could come live HERE. In Sugar Falls. It would be sooooooooo cool if we could hang out all the time. I’d be the only kid in my class to actually meet his real pen pal. I think I’m the only one now to still be getting letters and emails and stuff. Please please please think about living here after you get done at the hospital. I know I said Sugar Falls was dumb and boring, but it’s not really that way if we have each other we can hang out with. We could go fishing and everything.
You could stay with me and my mom. You’ll meet her when we pick you up at the airport to take you to the hospital. She’ll tell you that it’ll be so awesome. Please say yes!
Please.
Hunter
Cooper folded up the paper, and then looked at the standard issue class picture Hunter had sent in his original letter. He almost winced at the chubbiness of the kid’s face. The boy’s mom needed to get him off the cookies and onto a physical regimen, stat. Cooper may have had it rough growing up in a one-bedroom apartment in the slums of Detroit, but at least he’d been in shape and hadn’t taken any crap from the kids on the playground. Of course, taking crap from his stepdad was another thing.
Don’t think about the past. Think about the next step. The old adage he’d learned from his drill instructor had helped him to get past his crappy home life and rise up in the ranks. Even after his injury, he’d repeated the mantra dozens of times and knew that no matter how jacked up his leg was, he was a fighter and would get through this.
Once the surgeries were done, the physical therapy would be intense if Cooper wanted to regain full use of his leg. Maybe he could encourage Hunter to do some exercises with him. Heck, maybe Ms. Walker would be willing to get in shape with them.
The past few weeks, he’d found himself wondering about the boy’s mom more frequently. And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he’d lost his own mom at the age of twelve and had fantasized about what it would be like to have a real home. And loving parents.
So he’d talked to Hunter to make sure that the mother was okay with their pen pal relationship. He’d never written to the woman directly, nor had Hunter ever sent a picture of her, but Cooper had her pegged all the same. As an MP, he could read between the lines.
He didn’t want to overstep his boundaries or cause problems for the Walkers. But the woman’s world most likely revolved around cookies and not much else. By the time she got around to noticing he was even in her son’s life, Cooper would be long gone.
* * *
“Mom, can’t you make this thing go any faster? Jake Marconi’s dad got a new Porsche, and Jake said it can go like a hundred and sixty miles an hour.”
Maxine Walker shot a glance across the seat at her impressionable son, yet her mind was focused on how quickly she and Hunter could greet his soldier friend at the airport and make it back up to Sugar Falls before dark. She could care less about Jake Marconi’s dad’s latest midlife cry for attention. Besides, they’d gotten another couple inches of snow last night, and she didn’t like this two-lane stretch of highway down the mountain, even in optimal weather.
“Hunter, explain to me why we have to pick this guy up, again? Doesn’t the military provide him transportation to the hospital?”
“I told you. I promised him I’d meet him in person. How would you like to be blown up in a war zone and then fly all the way around the world to some random hospital where you don’t know anybody? He’s a war hero, Mom. It’s our patriotic duty.”
Maxine blew a blond curl out of her eye as she finally turned her SUV off the highway and toward the interstate that would take them toward the Boise Airport. She didn’t need her ten-year-old son to preach to her about patriotic duties. Maxine had grown up on Uncle Sam’s rhetoric. Both of her parents were career Army and had bounced her and her six siblings around from base to base until she finally left for Boise State at eighteen.
“I think you’ve boosted enough troop morale for all of us these past few months, Hunter. Isn’t it enough that I let you keep writing letters to this guy, even though we don’t know anything about him?”
“What are you talking about? I know everything about Cooper. He’s my best friend.”
And that, in a nutshell, explained why Maxine had allowed this unorthodox pen pal relationship to continue. Her heart broke for her son. Back when Hunter was in preschool, and even in kindergarten, all the kids seemed to be on equal ground. But it didn’t take long for social awareness and parental attitudes to filter into the classroom. And, by third grade, Hunter suddenly didn’t mesh very well with the other kids anymore.
At first Maxine had thought it was because of her. The other moms had always seemed to be a little threatened because she’d once been a college cheerleader and still looked the part. Plus, since she was single, she had the feeling that the other women went out of their way to make sure that she never spoke to their husbands alone—or even when under their direct supervision. So she and Hunter were rarely invited to any evening or family activities.
Then, when Maxine launched her cookie shop, she became so busy that she had very little time for playdates or other after-school events that kept all the other kids socially relevant.
She only wished she could keep Hunter as productive as the Sugar Falls Cookie Company. But her once-happy little boy had become increasingly introverted. And, as a result, he’d turned his attention more toward his computer and less toward the natural, outdoorsy life that their small-town community had to offer.
Luckily, she had her best girlfriends and her mother-in-law to help keep her son busy. And recently, she’d hired more employees to help out in the shop, which gave her a little more time for Hunter, although he didn’t seem to want to do anything. But this pen pal business certainly had him perked up, so Maxine jumped on the chance to nurture his enthusiasm.
It was tough enough raising her son alone. Even if Bo hadn’t wrapped his car around a tree in an overinflated exhibition of masculine pride, he probably wouldn’t have stayed around long enough to help her raise Hunter anyway. But still, having to meet her son’s pen pal face-to-face and playing chauffeur to some soldier they’d never met was one of those things no single-mom handbook had ever addressed.
So now she was winging it.
Back in September, she’d glanced at some of their earlier correspondence, if only to make sure this Cooper guy wasn’t some predator or an otherwise bad influence on her sweet-but-naive son. The marine seemed on the up-and-up and she figured the relationship would run its course and fizzle out eventually. She wasn’t happy about this unexpected shift in proximity or the significance Gunnery Sergeant Cooper was now having on both their lives.
Had she really let her son leave school early today for this?
“Did you print out that email with his itinerary?” she asked, wishing she had given this whole airport to hospital run a little more consideration.
“Yeah, here it is.” Hunter’s growing fingers held it under her nose, and she remembered the way she used to kiss those little hands when he was a baby.
She almost missed the exit for the airport.
“Hunter, I’m driving. I can’t read it right this second.”
“Then why’d you ask me for it?”
“I wanted to know the exact
