Helga and Phoebe's eyes turned to their former foe as his breath became labored and he squirmed about in his seat. With Leo having hogged the night (thus establishing the standard as to what parentage could sire and rear a specimen of bellicosity as Wolfgang) the two girls could naturally assume that Mama Toran was a match made in heaven for someone as heartless as the father.

"That's a word…" Phoebe began quietly. "Don't tell me she'll be-"

"No." Wolfgang said. "I told you already. My mother Antionette is in jail."

Much to their surprise, the two girls still found it in themselves to be shocked.

"Our criminal justice system at work ladies and gentlemen." Helga said throwing her hands skyward. "Unless your mother runs an organ theft ring or smuggles endangered animals for rich weirdos to keep as pets, I can't see how she's in jail but Captain Cringe over here walks among us."

"Ever heard of the Happy Sunshine Family?" Wolfgang asked.

Helga's face screws up in disbelief and revulsion as images of her father's brief foray into neo-hippieism flash back into her psyche in full force; the backyard meditation yurt, the asinine 'welcome the sun' ceremonies, and that godawful burlap toga…thankfully she had managed to get her father back on track before he forced them to live in the woods of Oregon singing songs and eating bark.

"Didn't they recently get arrested for tax evasion and embezzlement?" Phoebe interjected.

"Who do you think was cooking the books?" Wolfgang replied with a solemn affirmative nod. "Yeah, like any cult, there tended to be a gulf between what they practiced and what they preached. All the run of the mill stuff; those in charge living the good life while the disciples lived in brainwashed squalor. Because mom was the financial face of the outfit, she got the stiffest sentence after the leader Maurice 'Earth Flower' McKeen."

"And before my already strained sense of disbelief snaps like a twig, how pray tell does a hippie accountant cross paths a vaguely fascist redneck? Let alone runs away and has four kids with him?" Helga asked.

"Three kids, remember." Wolfgang began. "But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself."

Wolfgang took another swig of water. Perhaps the deepest one he had ingested since they entered. With a swallow and a sigh, he could see all the words in the English language at his command. The question now was which ones would he use.

"Leo …how do I put this delicately?... has a type; women who either had emotional damage or wanted to piss their parents off. He also had a sixth sense for sniffing out such girls like a shark to bleeding seals… And near the campus of Evergreen State in the Winter of '73, he wound up crossing paths with Antionette Caudell, an early graduate who despite feeling that the whole 'hippie/peace/love' thing was getting too played out, was looking to hitchhike to San Francisco."

"Being a loose and wild bad boy, Leo checked off all the boxes. Her hippie friends would hate him because he had no use for peace, wore leather and drove a noisy motorcycle, while her daddy who fought in WWII would see him as the wrong kind of veteran…"

Helga and Phoebe stared at each other in confusion.

"His 'decision' to serve, such as it was, didn't come from a sense of duty or patriotism." Wolfgang clarified. "It was more of a 'got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in his hand' kind of deal. Even then, for all his chest thumping about being a big bad war machine, he only saw action for the last nine months before troops began pulling out."

"Oh." The two girls said in glum unison.

"Anyway, half a year passes and he charmed her enough that they got married and settled in Lincoln City so that he could be close to his friends in the Gypsy Jokers gang. Little by little however, the mystique of being Leo's Old Lady* started to lose it's luster; especially as Marlene, Tara and Clarise entered the picture. Their home became an annex of the biker's clubhouse, festooned with half-drunk bottles of beer and permanently reeking of cigarettes. If he wasn't drunk, he was violent and temperamental. As if that weren't enough, he made no bones about how much he felt the girls were a cruel joke from nature, and how much he longed for a son. There was this resentment about their presence, and because of that, he'd often go hunting for 'strange' as he put it. Keeping a collection of panties of all the women he's…"

"We get it." Phoebe and Helga said in fearful unison.

"And through it all Antionette stayed, mostly out of fear." Wolfgang continued. "But also, because Leo always forced her to remember how awful and controlling life at home was, and just like that she was putty in his hands…that is until I was born."

Wolfgang took another deep sip of water before continuing.

"To put it politely, I came into the world by virtue of Leo's fickle pickle. A product of one of his many one-night stands. From what Antionette told me, the look of joy in his eye was the most frightening, and when he rode off six months later on another 'adventure' she moved out and sought refuge with the Happy Sunshine Family who always seemed to move us from house to house whenever Leo's biker goons got wind of us. Ironically, even though she worked and lived among hippies, she raised me as anything but, almost to the point where it felt like I wasn't so much a son as I was a science experiment. And of course, Tara and Clarissa never really saw me as their brother…"

"And because home left you in a constant state of weakness, you bullied those below you at every turn in school." Phoebe finished as she turned to Helga. "Sound familiar?"

"Look, again, I have nothing but regrets for all the things I did at PS 118." Wolfgang said. "And I'm not going to say 'if I could take it back and do it all again I would' because I can't. I can only ask forgiveness from God and go forward."

"Yeah, I was going to say, you've really hit the Jesus juice hard since moving here." Helga said. "How did that happen?"

"Again, it all goes back to the oboe." Wolfgang answered. "Mom initially made me take lessons as a punishment, but in secret, I learned to love the ability of creating music and getting in touch with a side of me that few if any get to see…"

"Don't…even…start…" Helga snarled as Phoebe smiled knowingly at her.

"…but within the first three months of moving in with Leo after mom's arrest, he broke my Oboe in hopes of toughening me up. I tried to keep my sadness in all day but…after a while I couldn't. Deacon Olchovy, who also works as the school music teacher saw me crying and he's been my friend ever since."

"Speaking of which."

As Phoebe gestured to the figure of Deacon Sawa making his way to the restaurant entrance, Helga leapt from the booth and barreled to meet him at the door. The hurricane of wrath churning beneath her numbness had broken free. Seeing red, she shoves the portal open and steps into the chilly November night ready to give the man a well-deserved piece of her mind.


*Biker slang for Wife/Girlfriend.