We're All Broken

by O. L. Gregory

  “Mr. Hayes? Please come forward.”

  Roger shook off his thoughts, stood, and moved to his previous spot.

  “The board has considered all the factors involved in your crime, the circumstances leading up to it, and the work you’ve done here since. Not one person here has a negative thing to say about you. While we were tempted to deny parole on the principle of only having served five years alone, when we add it to your victim’s testimony, and to all of your therapists saying that you are ready to be released from their treatment, we really only have two choices. One, we transfer you to prison, with weekly therapy sessions, or we send you home, with weekly therapy sessions.

  “With that in mind, we find ourselves uncomfortable with the idea of placing you in a prison with other killers and hardened criminals. At this point, we see no good for your mental health coming from your exposure to that. So, with a modicum of reservation, we are hereby granting your parole. You will have to meet with your parole officer once a week, and attend a private therapy session once a week. If your transition back into the world proves challenging, you are more than encouraged to attend additional therapy sessions. Adding those therapy sessions will not reflect poorly on your parole.”

  Roger was legitimately shocked, and it showed. While he’d hoped, he’d also done his best to convince himself that it wouldn’t happen. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  “You can go back to your room, to gather your things, then you are free to go after signing some paperwork.”

  “Thank you,” Roger said, very much looking like he was waiting for someone to tell him they were only joking.

  The leader, seeing that Roger had yet to move, asked, “Do you have someone you can call? I know there’s no one here, waiting for you.”

  Roger nodded. “I didn’t think I’d get out, so I told him not to come.”

  “You’ll be given a phone call to arrange transportation. Then you can gather your things and handle the paperwork while you wait for someone to get here for you.”

  Roger nodded and slowly headed for the door.

  “Mr. Hayes?”

  Roger halted and turned around.

  “Good luck.”

  “Th-thank you.” Roger turned back to the door and left the room. The officer assigned to him led him to the phones and Roger called Simon, his criminal lawyer.

  “A little re-entry information,” Simon said, once Roger was settled in the car and they were on their way, “take things one at a time.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re lucky that Max has kept your home going for you, as long as he is on the up-and-up as much as he seems to be, you should have a much smoother re-entry into home and work than most people do.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you think Max has screwed you over in any way, you call me and let me take a look at things first, before you react, okay?”

  Roger nodded.

  “Now, your kids.”

  Roger’s eyebrow lifted and he turned from gawking out the windows.

  “I did a little digging ahead of your hearing, just in case, because I knew you’d want a little bit of an update.”

  Roger sat up a little straighter, “Yeah?”

  “The youngest two have been adopted.”

  “Together?”

  “Yes.”

  Roger let out a small breath of relief. “I’m glad the twins are together. And, honestly, they probably wouldn’t remember me at all, anyway. It’s probably the best thing for them.”

  “Your oldest was also adopted.”

  “How did they find someone willing to adopt a teenager?”

  Simon shrugged. “It happens, from time to time. She got lucky.”

  “Unless there’s an older teenage boy in the house.”

  Simon was already shaking his head. “I saw enough of the paperwork to know there’s not. I have every reason to believe she is safe and well cared for.”

  “And my middle two?”

  Simon sighed. “Those two are still in the system, and from what I saw, they’ve been moved from the group home and into separate foster homes.”

  Roger shook his head. “I wish they’d been left together.”

  “I know. But nothing shows up as ever having been reported to be wrong. So, we hope and pray they have good placements, in homes with people who care.”

  “How can I let them know that I’ll be here for them when they’re eighteen?”

  “For now, nothing. I can help you track them down just before their birthdays, though. I can help you get a message to them. In the meantime? Staying in your home, where you’ll be easily findable for them is the best thing you can do. That, and staying out of trouble.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Re-Entry

  Simon got out of the car with Roger and they went to the front door of Roger's home. Roger reached out and touched the door with reverence. It amazed him how much he still associated this house with Annabeth. In some alternate universe, he liked to believe that she was inside, preparing an after-school snack for their small brood. He wondered if there'd be another child by now, they had agreed on six…

  "Are you alright?" Simon asked.

  "Yeah," Roger said, shaking himself out of his reverie. He put the key in the lock and turned, the door opening into a living room all but identical to his memory. "I just want to go up and change before we go downstairs."

  Simon nodded. "I'll wait."

  Ten minutes went by before Roger came back down the stairs.

  "Ready?" Simon asked.

  Nodding, Roger headed for the basement door and went down.

  Heads turned when Roger walked down the stairs, and Max's face went from shock, to surprise, to a bright smile. "Are you out for real, or do we need to hide you?" he asked, getting up and coming to give him a hug.

  "I'm out, on parole, hopefully for good."

  Max clapped him on the back when he pulled away. "Wish you would have told me. We'd have taken a field trip to get you out in style."

  Roger shook his head. "It was such a longshot, only Simon knew because he helped me make sure the paperwork was perfect."

  "Well, c'mon, let's get everyone acquainted. Guys," he said, looking at the small group of people watching the scene unfold, "this is our boss, Roger, fresh from the big house. It's his home we invade every day. Roger, this is Gerry, Kelly, Brian, and Moss."

  "Moss?" Roger asked.

  "Short for Massimo," the guy answered, rising to shake Roger's hand. "It was either that, or listen to them call me Mo-mo. No way was I answering to that."

  Roger shook his hand and nodded in understanding. He greeted Brian and Gerry, then turned to Kelly, "How do you handle this crowd, being the only female around?"

  She shrugged even as she returned his handshake. "Easy, I put in the lunch orders. If they irritate me too much, we all eat rabbit food."

  Roger chuckled. "That would do it."

  Max took a breath. "I imagine you brought Simon in to go over the daily logs?"

  Roger nodded. "The accountant is on his way. I'd like to get up to speed as quickly as possible."

  Max nodded, "Gerry, can you handle taking the O'Donnell meeting at two?"

  "Yep," Gerry said with a nod.

  "Alright," Max said, "I'll grab my laptop and we'll go upstairs."

  Roger paused, reaching out to touch the delicate leaves of a fern.

  "I handle the office fund," Kelly told him. "I like keeping the place presentable for when the clients come in. Plus, I keep the small fridge down here filled with drinks and sandwiches."

  Roger nodded. "Quite the step up from when I left."

  Max had been a godsend.

  The single best thing he’d done since his wife’s death was to hire that kid… who was no longer a kid. Max had grown and matured right along with his business.

  Everything looked well maintained, everything carefully accounted for. Max had kept log books of each person's accomplishments for ea
ch day, along with a current tally of everyone's ongoing projects.

  And the financial records were impeccable. Max kept careful track of each app's earnings, giving each developer their share of the profits, down to the rounded-up penny. Not to mention Roger's personal finances, which Max had babysat for him.

  Roger walked both his lawyer and his accountant to the door, before turning to Max.

  "Max, I can't thank you enough for how well you've managed all this."

  "Hey, you've made sure we all had the ability to earn money right alongside you. That's the best kind of boss. And you might have been the absent, silent type, but you provided the workspace, the highest earning app project, and then yet another money maker with that scheduling program. Everyone seems genuinely content to be here."

  Roger breathed a deep sigh of relief. He was home, and hadn't been robbed blind by those he'd entrusted with everything he had left in this life. "They all know what I was incarcerated for, right?"

  Max nodded. "I told them what happened, and why you did it, before offering each the job. I had a few applicants walk out the door over it, but everyone down there gets it."

  Roger nodded, looking around. "I think I'm going to stay up here the rest of the day. Get used to breathing the air and make a list of stuff I need. Maybe hit the ground running with you guys, tomorrow."

  Max nodded. "You can take a couple days to get your bearings. We'll all understand. But, if you do come down tomorrow, you can start sitting in on my meetings, start getting familiar with clients and whatnot. Please, ask me any questions you have."

  "I don't want you to feel like I'm pushing you out. If I do something that rocks a perfectly sound boat, I want you to say something. I may own it, but you’ve been running it successfully."

  "And I want more time to code. So, I welcome your interference with the day to day operations. We can figure out the balance as we go."

  "And as we go, maybe we start talking about making you a full partner with me."

  Max's eyes lit up. "Damn, I must've done really good."

  "Let's just see how well we can still get along okay? You certainly deserve something after all you've done."

  "Well, I thought about robbing you a time or two, maybe some corporate espionage, but seeing what you were going through, and knowing what you were in for, was enough to scare me straight."

  Roger snorted.

  "I watched my parents work shit jobs they hated, for years. You were awesome to work with, and I liked your principles about paying workers for the successes they were each responsible for bringing to the company. That's something I wanted to spread around, not cheat on when your back was turned."

  Slipping back into work-mode the next day was a welcomed change. Having Kelly put in an order for food from a local restaurant into an app, and having someone else deliver it was even better.

  “Why the hell didn’t one of us come up with this app idea?” Roger mumbled around a mouthful of chicken piccata.

  “Because we don’t want the headache of managing all the people involved with driving, and then heading a customer service department on top of it,” Max answered. “That app is a business onto itself.”

  “Well, I’ve got one to run by the two of you,” Moss said.

  Max looked up from his lunch, “Shoot.”

  Moss wiped his mouth. “I was telling my aunt about how you got the idea for the scheduling app from talking to the actual workers who needed it, and learning directly from them what they wanted, and then used them as Guinea pigs in working out all the kinks.”

  “You mean listening to people bitch at work while I was a prisoner in mental institution? Yeah, go on.”

  Moss didn’t know how to take that, and the others stiffened in the atmospheric tension.

  Roger let out a chuckle, “We can talk about it, guys. We can call it what it was. I was raised by an abusive alcoholic. Then, one day, he did me a favor and died. I crawled out of my hole and made a damned good life for myself. Then, one day, another alcoholic came and took the most important piece of it away from me, and instead of rising to the challenge, I crumbled. I started building it all back up again, but gave in to a moment of weakness, and then we all found out just how thoroughly I had lost my marbles. It’s okay, really. I’ve spent five intensive years dealing with it and healing. So, don’t be afraid to bring it up.”

  Max turned back to Moss, “Go on.”

  Moss nodded. “Okay, well, my aunt is an elementary school teacher. She wants to come up with a program that will allow all the first-grade teachers in the building to put all their digital copies of worksheets and project outlines and whatnot into a shared program, where they can all access the materials. A lot of them make up their own, and the thought is to provide each other with more options, if they can categorize them by unit and lesson plan, which would make it curriculum-specific.

  “And if they can get their teachers onboard, they can take it to the other schools in the district, and get their first-grade teachers onboard. They can share resources amongst thirty, forty teachers. Then, they can get other grade-levels onboard with it, and have a district-wide resource.”

  Kelly was already shaking her head. “Until they change curriculums.”

  Moss was already nodding his head. “Which is why we need an algorithm to adjust the groupings according to other curriculums, so they could just go in and update the curriculum in use. And then cross-reference them with each state’s standards, so they can be searched by either.”

  Kelly nodded, “And if you can get other districts onboard…”

  “Exactly. We market as a curriculum accompaniment. Maybe we leave an option to earn points for adding resources. And the points can be saved for, I don’t know, a t-shirt with a teacher meme, or maybe we do a subscription format and they get a free month, or something in exchange for their ideas.”

  “A one-stop teacher resource,” Roger said. “I like it, research it out and see what’s already out there, make sure what you want to do is different. I assume your aunt’s group of teachers is willing to Guinea pig for us and give us critiques?”

  Moss nodded.

  “You’re also going to have to figure out how much we’d have to charge versus how much teachers are willing to pay. I can tell you from my wife's experience, they already pay a lot out of pocket. So, you'd better be replacing more expense than you're asking for in return. Another thing to consider is to always allow the teachers working in that district to use it for free, and they can continue to Guinea pig for us, as it grows and changes.”

  Later on, Roger was on his main floor, his workday complete, looking at the contents of his newly stocked refrigerator. Keeping Helen on part-time, to maintain the office area downstairs and the few rooms up here they’d used, was a stroke of genius, because the woman remembered all his favorites, and she’d gone out that morning and bought them for the house, upon learning he was home again.

  The day after tomorrow would be Friday, and he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to work, rent movies and catch up on five years’ worth of entertainment, or go driving around to see what had changed. The drive here yesterday had felt like a time-warp, and he wasn’t sure how hard he wanted to dive into discovering it all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  What the Hell…?

  It was Friday afternoon, the last bell had just rung, and I couldn’t wait to get home. Mom and Dad had finally bought the boat they’d been saving up forever for, and this was going to be our first weekend out. We couldn’t leave until everyone made it home by six, but I wanted to help make sure everything was in the truck and ready to go when they got there.

  Sadie was already headed off on her bike for the dance studio, to take one of her endless lessons.

  It was voice lessons today. She says she wants to be an actress, and so she takes three kinds of dance lessons and then voice lessons, and acts in a community theatre and basically runs herself into exhaustion.

  And me? I was more the debate clu
b, knowledge bowl, amateur cyber sleuthing kind of girl. You know, kind of geeky, but smart enough not to care.

  I headed for my bike, remembering that Mom had forgotten to pick up a bottle of sunblock when she had gone shopping for our trip, and had texted me during English class to stop and buy a bottle on my way home.

  I retrieved my bike from the rack and looked around, to see if it was clear for me to start riding, and froze when my eyes landed on a car more familiar to me than my route home was.

  At first, I’d nearly dismissed it as a look-alike. After all, it’d been a popular model ten years ago, when it was new. It hadn’t been the first time seeing one had stopped me in my tracks. But this one had the dent in the rear bumper, from my mother, my real mother, bumping into a fire hydrant, trying to turn around in the middle of the road, because she’d forgotten the twins’ sippy cups that were still sitting on the kitchen counter.

  I tried to see the driver, but he was looking out the front window, at the buses and kids loading onto them.

  I walked my bike closer, not wanting to get close enough to be creepy or nothing. I knew Daddy had an employee who kept things going for him, but what would that Max guy be doing here?

  I rolled a little closer as the driver turned his head and I got a look at his profile and, I swear, my heart skipped beats as I recognized him. My Daddy, my real daddy, my bio-daddy, whatever anybody might want to call him, was sitting right over there. I was maybe twenty feet away from him. And he looked very much like he was looking for somebody.

  Looking for me.

  There was a part of me that wanted to go running up to the car, fling the door open, yank him out, and hug him.

  But then there was the hurt little girl in me that was still pissed that he’d let one impulse ruin our chances of ever being together again. And, yes, I know he had mental health issues, PTSD from living with his father, and depression, and some anxiety. I understood all of that. I just, ugh, I just wished he could have been stronger, you know?

  He had to be looking for me, there was no other reason for him to be here. And, by the way, why was he here, like, out here, in the freedom? I was told he’d have to serve at least seven years, if not more, before ever having the chance of parole.