A Marine For His Mum

Hunter Walker

Chapter One (#ulink_a63635ef-52e8-5e94-b263-0c190cd56bac)

Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Cooper closed his eyes and clenched the armrests as his plane touched down onto the tarmac in Boise. No matter how many times he’d flown to obscure places around the world, he never got used to the steady decline and the rough bounce of the landing. But this time, he felt as if his entire future was skidding toward the edge of the runway.

A couple of months ago, when he’d stormed out of his commanding officer’s makeshift headquarters with Hunter Walker’s letter crumpled in his hand, he’d been mad as hell. He’d been even more pissed off at Dr. Gregson for suggesting he participate in the ridiculous pen pal program and pairing him up with some goofy kid in Nowheresville, Idaho.

As the seat belt light dinged off, Cooper remembered thinking that a Marine Corps base in Afghanistan wasn’t any place for him to be playing nanny-by-mail to some ten-year-old kid with an overprotective mom and no friends. It wasn’t as if Cooper had been some lonely nineteen-year-old infantry grunt who needed a morale boost. He’d been a provost sergeant who’d held some of the deadliest Taliban leaders in custody in the base brig. Before that, he’d been stationed as an MP at bases all over the world. He’d broken up bar fights, investigated assaults and murder, and even gone undercover with NCIS on a few occasions. He had no business being some kid’s babysitter or even worse, male role model.

But now that Cooper’s tour of duty, and possibly his entire military career, was at a sudden end thanks to a random suicide bomber, that same kid and the bond they’d established over emails and letters was the only glimpse of brightness in his dark, lonely future.

As the center aisle of the aircraft filled up with people trying to reclaim their belongings from the overhead bins, Cooper fiddled with his seat belt and longed to stand and stretch out his legs. But his knee was barely being held together with pins and screws, and he would have to wait for the rest of the passengers to disembark the plane before some airline personnel would load him up on a wheelchair and push his useless body out to the baggage claim area.

He hated being weak and was questioning his earlier decision to allow Hunter to see him like this the first time they met. He ached with stiffness, and he was completely exhausted. He’d been traveling on a commercial airline for well over thirty hours now, with layovers in both Tokyo and San Francisco. He’d taken a Vicodin in the Frisco airport an hour before he boarded the last leg of his flight, and now he wondered whether he was in any shape to meet his young pen pal face-to-face.

Or to allow the kid’s mom to drive him to the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

Crap. How had he let Hunter talk him into that? Sure, he and the chatty fifth grader had built up quite the steady stream of correspondence when he’d been stationed in Afghanistan, and then later, as he’d been recuperating at the closest base hospital. And although he wasn’t what most people would consider a believer in divine intervention, Cooper had to question the alignment of fate when the doctors in Okinawa told him that the two best options he had to recover the use of his leg would be an intense orthopedic surgery at either Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland or the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

Cooper’s distal femur fracture would need to be repaired and healed before they could even think about a total knee replacement. He was looking at a long recovery time and, while he normally didn’t mind his loner lifestyle or the fact that he didn’t have any family to speak of, he figured that if he went to Shadowview, he’d at least be close to Hunter.

How pathetic was that?

He tried to comfort himself with the belief that Hunter needed him. The kid didn’t have any positive male role models, and while the boy’s mom probably loved him, it sounded like Hunter really needed a strong hand to get him in check. What the hell was wrong with the kid’s mother? Putting him in yoga classes and forbidding sports? Who does that to a boy? Guessing by her baking job, she was probably just as out of shape as the kid—if not more so—and too busy working to bother with taking care of her son.

It had been a bone of contention between Cooper and his ex-wife, but one thing Cooper had learned early on in the foster care system was that people shouldn’t be having kids if they were too busy to raise them.

That old familiar pang cramped inside his left rib cage, and he grabbed his backpack from under the seat just to give himself something to do. He winced as the forward movement added pressure to his leg, but the physical pain was at least better than the emotional pain that he’d almost let get the better of him.

There seemed to be some sort of delay exiting the plane because nobody was moving forward. Cooper pulled the printout of one of his past emails from Hunter from his backpack and read it.

To: matthewcooper@usmc.mil

From: hunterlovestherockies@hotmail.net

Re: Surgery

Date: Jan 3

Wow! I can’t believe your actually coming Idaho to have your operation. How long do you have to stay in the hospital? I’ll have my mom and my Gram bring me down every week to visit you. Maybe I can hitchhike rides down the mountain too, when my mom is working. Jake Marconi said he hitchhiked once with his cousin and they went all the way to Winnemucca.

Are you real real worried about your knee? I’d be crazy worried if I were you. They should probably award your dog Helix a purple heart or a navy cross or something for going after that bomber and saving your life like that. Will they let you still be a marine if your knee don’t heal right?

You can still be my pen pal even if they kick you out and you’re not a marine no more. Where will you live when you get out of the hospital?

I went to Hawaii once with Gram. You could live 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?