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Rocinante has turned up the music, rolled down the window and lets the wind blow around his nose. A squeaky yellow scented tree and a small red plush heart dangle under the rear-view mirror.
“Who you gonna call?”, sings Rocinante, followed immediately by “GHOST BUSTERS!” in a high-pitched, disguised voice. He puts on the blinker, nods in time to the music and turns the steering wheel. The Ford turns into the driveway and rolls into the parking lot of Oda Elementary School.
A few heads turn in irritation at his car, which squeezes into a free parking space to the loud background music of Ray Parker Jr.'s 'Ghostbusters'.
As Rocinante folds himself out of the driver's seat and strolls leisurely towards the entrance of the elementary school, he has the feeling of finally belonging to an illustrious circle of people, but on the other hand he feels completely out of place.
A small crowd of people has already formed in front of the glass entrance door, all of whom seem to be women. Some of them are holding cups of steaming coffee, others are playing with their car keys or scrolling on their smart phones.
Rocinante pushes his hands into his pockets and looks up at the building in front of which he will be standing for the next ten minutes.
‘Sports hall of Oda Primary School’ is written in colorful letters above the glass door.
Some of the women notice him, registering with raised eyebrows that a tall man with blond hair, rumpled shirt and washed-out jeans is standing in their ranks. The clattering of keys and sipping of coffee becomes more aggressive.
Normally you pick up Law from his sports club. But today you have a doctor's appointment and Rocinante is on vacation and is now standing in front of the elementary school for the very first time, surrounded by a crowd of mothers who are also picking up their children.
Rocinante takes a deep breath and feels like he has arrived in life.
One woman in particular, with a blonde head of curls and huge sunglasses on her nose, looks over at him suspiciously and rocks restlessly back and forth in her tennis shoes. She sips aggressively from a huge Starbucks cup and then immediately looks at the smartwatch on her wrist.
Suddenly, the crowd of coffee-drinking, key-jangling moms starts to move. A black Porsche with tinted windows turns into the school driveway and rolls into a free parking lot. A tall man gets out and even Rocinante, who is busy sending a flood of red hearts to you via text message, notices the sudden change around him. Most of the moms suddenly cast languorous glances in his direction – or rather in the direction of the newcomer, who joins Rocinante as if in protest.
As inconspicuously as possible, Rocinante squints to his left.
The man is almost as tall as he is (around two meters), wearing what appears to be a tailored button-down shirt with a black coat made of combed wool. The scattered strands of gray that streak his inky black hair and his twirled mustache give him the look of a Spanish dance instructor. In combination with his stern but even features and caramel-colored eyes, he really does look like he has stepped out of a calendar of underwear models.
Rocinante turns his head to the other side. A few mothers are still casting enraptured glances in their direction – except for of the woman with the blonde curls and sunglasses. She is sucking hard on the straw of her Starbucks cup with a bitter look on her face.
Rocinante ducks his head in discomfort and looks at the time on his cell phone instead. Five minutes to go until the end of the lesson.
“She's staring at you because she doesn't know you,” sighs the man on his left.
“Excuse me?”
“The woman with the blonde curls. That's Jola. She involves herself everywhere. If she sees someone she doesn't know outside the school, she immediately thinks of child abduction or something like that.”
Speechless, Rocinante looks over at him.
The man snorts in amusement when he notices Rocinante's look. “It was the same with us. I usually pick up Zorro from training. Once, when I didn't had time and my partner was waiting here, Jola was already standing on the mat and wanted to know who he was and what he was doing here.”
“But she's not part of the school staff, is she?”, Rocinante wonders, glancing over at Jola, who is indeed staring over at them at irregular intervals with pursed lips and a scrutinizing look.
“Worse,” the man grumbles. “She's the parents' representative and that's why she feels she's been chosen to protect the pupils from anything she thinks is dangerous and suspicious.”
“Okay, thanks for the tip,” says Rocinante, not quite sure whether to laugh or cry.
The glass door of the sports hall opens and the first students pour out.
After endless minutes, Law finally trots out of the sports hall. He is accompanied by two boys. One has red hair, a big nose and a cap on his head. The other is lanky and wears a T-shirt with penguins printed all over it. Lost in thought, Law kicks his yellow gym bag in front of him with every step. He has pulled his black and white polka-dotted hat, which comes from a collection of old band shirts and costumes, down low on his forehead. Every now and then, Law throws a few sentences into the conversation.
The three of them stand a little apart in front of the sports hall, put their heads together and whisper to each other conspiratorially, as only children do.
Rocinante grins to himself.
Law has quickly made friends in his class, although he sometimes tends to be solitary and introverted. The two boys have even visited you and Law once before. Back then, they all introduced themselves with their “call signs”.
The one with the red hair called himself “Shachi”, the one with the penguin shirt was “Penguin” and Law had given himself the name “The Surgeon”.
All three of them had felt really cool that day when they had called each other by their “call signs”, strolled through the neighboring allotments with a soccer ball under their arms and finally ate yogurt ice cream in front of the TV with their clothes covered in grass stains.
As he sees the three boys standing together like this, Rocinante can't help but think back to the time when he himself was six or seven years old and used to play with Doffy in the garden.
“Hey Law!”, Rocinante calls, waving towards the boy. Law lifts his head, looks around searchingly, recognizes Rocinante beaming like a ray of sunshine among the other parents and pulls a face. He promptly turns back to his friends.
The man next to him laughs. “No matter what you do, at a certain age you can't please your children.”
Rocinante sighs in resignation and decides to simply wait until Law has finished his really important conversation. “You have children, too?”, he asks the man instead.
He nods. “Two daughters and a son; all of them are in the middle of puberty. They remind me every day how 'embarrassing' and 'uncool' I am.”
Rocinante smiles.
Next to him, Jola, the self-appointed school sheriff, has registered his unsuccessful approach and has also noticed the boy's dismissive reaction. However, she interpreted Law's reaction completely differently: Not as that of an annoyed 7-year-old boy who didn't at all like the exuberant cheerfulness of his mother's boyfriend, but as a fearful retreat from a man he didn't know.
She is also sure that the boy is normally picked up by a woman. And it certainly can't be the boy's father, as Jola can't see a wedding ring on the blond's finger or any resemblance to Law.
Should the man approach the boy in any way, Jola would intervene, confront the bully and shoo him away from the school parking lot. With these thoughts in mind, she sucks greedily on the straw of her iced coffee latte cup, almost hoping that the man would try again so she could intervene.
The glass front door opens again and a handful of teenagers trot out. They all wear the uniform of a middle school, and Rocinante dimly remembers that the ‘Eiichiro Middle School’ also uses the facilities of this gym for its afternoon classes.
A girl, her face full of pimples, her hair parted in the middle and dyed red on one side and white on the other, trots towards Rocinante and the man. She swings an instrument case beside her while typing on a cell phone. Wireless headphones are around her neck.
“Is dad here yet?”, she asks with a bored expression and puts the cell phone in her pocket.
“No”, replies Rocinante's neighbor, ”but Shanks should be here any minute.”
The girl moans in her best teenage manner and stands three steps away from them, only to immediately pull her headphones over her ears and start typing on her phone again.
Rocinante searches their faces for something in common, for any resemblance, however small, but finds nothing. The girl looks as much like the black-haired man as he looks like Law. To his own surprise, this discovery makes him breathe a sigh of relief.
Just at that moment, a red Ford Mustang with a roaring engine turns into the school driveway and squeezes into a far too narrow parking space next to the black Porsche. A man with flaming red hair and a stubble gets out of the Mustang. He trots towards the black-haired man and the girl as cheerfully as a sunshine and without paying any attention to the distraught-looking mothers: “Hello, my darlings!”, he greets from afar, gives the girl a quick hug, gives a friendly not to Rocinante and then puts his right arm around the black-haired girl's narrow waist as inconspicuously as possible. “Let me guess, Mihawk... Perona and Zorro are dawdling again.”
“Perona still has to do her make-up”, grumbles the pimply-faced girl. “And Zorro's still chatting to that guy he's been fond of lately.”
“What guy?”, asks Shanks suspiciously, putting his hands on his hips – or rather his hand. Only now does Rocinante notice that Shanks' left shirt sleeve is hanging limply down his body.
“Well, Zorro's got a ‘friend’. He always says that there's nothing between them. But then he always stays a little longer after training” – at this point she forms quotation marks with her index and middle fingers – ”to talk to Sanji.”
“to talk to Sanji...”, Shanks mumbles, unconvinced.
The gym door opens for the third time and two teenagers (a boy with green hair and three golden ear rings on one side and a girl with candy-pink pigtails and far too much mascara on her eyelashes) step outside. When they see Mihawk (with a deadpan expression) and Shanks (with a far too happy expression), the boy rolls his eyes. The girl pretends not to have seen her two fathers at all and continues to talk to her brother, who is shouldering his training katana with an unnerved look on his face.
“How was training?”, Mihawk asks the boy.
“Same as usual,” Zorro grumbles, shrugging his shoulders meaninglessly.
Mihawk gives Rocinante a meaningful look, as if to tell him that’s what he earlier meant with 'uncool' and 'embarrassing'.
Rocinante has to laugh. And Mihawk also snorts in amusement.
“Well then, I'll take the girls home and you can drop Zorro off at Yasopp and Banchina's”, Shanks whispers to Mihawk and presses a fond goodbye kiss to his husband's lips.
Rocinante takes a step to the side to give the two of them a little more privacy.
“Tch!”, moans the girl with the candy-pink pigtails. “Do it somewhere else! I don't want to have to watch my parents making out... Really, you guys are so embarrassing!”
Shanks laughs without responding and shoos his daughters back to his red Ford Mustang.
“Well, enjoy the time with your son; once he reaches the critical age, you'll miss the time when he was still so quiet”, Mihawk sighs good-naturedly and looks over at Law.
Rocinante has to smile.
Law is laughing as he says goodbye to Penguin and Shachi with a rather long and complicated sequence of handshakes.
“Law is not my son... well not officially”, he hastens to say.
Mihawk merely shrugs his shoulders. “Uta is not my biological daughter either. And yet she is my daughter and I am her dad.” He twists the golden wedding ring on his finger. “Uta is Shank's daughter. Zorro and Perona are my biological children from my first marriage. And yet I consider all three of them my children. Just as Shanks sees Zorro and Perona as his children and himself as their dad.”
Rocinante is silent and looks down at his own hands and his bare ring finger.
Mihawk notices and smirks. “Remember one thing: any fool can father a child. But not everyone is man enough to be a father. And you seem to be a good father. You pick your son up from sports, you give him time to be with his friends... And for that you don't need a wedding ring and all of that.”
“I honestly don't know if Law thinks of me as a father... or if he ever thinks of me as his- well...”
“That's for Law to decide, and your job is to accept that decision. No matter what it turns out to be. Fathers support their children and give them advice when that advice is wanted. Law may never see you as his ‘biological’ father, but you can still be a good dad to him.”
Rocinante stands frozen on the spot, not knowing what to say.
But Mihawk doesn't seem to expect an answer. He nods to him, gives Rocinante a friendly pat on the shoulder and saunters back to his black Porsche. Perona and Uta are currently squeezing into the back seats of the red Mutang. Zorro kicks pebbles in front of him, throws his wooden katana into the trunk and plops down in the passenger seat. Mihawk gets in as well, backs up with a flourish and greets Rocinante with a short flash of his headlights.
The parking lot has mostly emptied by now. A few mothers are still there waiting for their kids, others are engrossed in conversation and Law finally comes strolling towards him.
Rocinante looks at the boy, sees the light pigment spots on his skin, the raven-black hair peeking out from under the fluffy brim of his hat.
Law's biological father is an absolute taboo. He had approached you about it twice and both times you had made it clear to him that you weren't ready to talk about it - whatever that meant.
But even Law had never mentioned his father at any time.
Mihawk's words were buzzing around in his head: 'Maybe Law will never see you as his ‘biological’ father, but you can still be a good dad to him.
It's true, becoming a father and being a father are two completely different things.
“Well Law, have you finally-”
“Who are you and what do you want from the boy?!”
Blonde and curly Jola suddenly stands in his way with her half-empty coffee cup like an angry gnome. Rocinante looks down at her, completely taken by surprise and has almost forgotten about the self-proclaimed school sheriff.
“I'm... I'm picking up my son”, Rocinante blurts out, not really realizing exactly what he's saying.
“But I've never seen you here before!” Jola doesn't let up and pushes towards him with her eyes wide open.
A few minutes ago, he would probably have been desperately trying to justify himself and explain that Law was his girlfriend's son and therefore his son, somehow...
He looks over the blonde curly mop of hair of the clamoring Jola to Law, who has also stopped in uncertainty and doesn't seem to know quite how to deal with this nasty person who is behaving like an angry terrier in front of Rocinante.
“Doesn't mom have time?”, Law asks in a loud voice over the ruckus.
Jola turns around in surprise and sees Law, who looks at her dismissively.
“She's at the dentist”, Rocinante replies curtly and waits until Law has come to his side.
“Oh, okay,” mumbles the boy, looking almost a little disappointed. But then an idea seems to come to his mind. “Roociiii~?”, he begins in a tone Law always uses when he wants something he's not supposed to have. “Roci... can we go to Burger King? Just the two of us? They've got sushi burgers with chicken nuggets this week. And Coke! And crispy fries!”
Law has not only taken the wind out of Jola's sails, but also out of Rocinante’s, who was secretly expecting an extra allowance or something else.
“Sure, we can do that. But only if we keep it our little secret.”
Law's face lights up like a firework. Eyes gleaming, he runs past Jola, who is almost in tears with frustration and disbelief at being ignored like this.
As Law sits in his adjustable seat, which for once is in the front passenger seat and not in the back, Rocinante turns the ignition key.
They both flinch as Rocinantes phone connects to the Ford’s Bluetooth signal and 'Ghost Busters' starts blaring out of the speakers at full volume again.
“Turn it down!”, Law shouts in horror.
Rocinante turns the knob, but accidentally screws it in the wrong direction and Law angrily and embarrassedly pulls the brim of his hat into his face as Ray Parker Jr. let’s out his unmistakable “Who you gonna call? - Ghostbusters!” across the parking lot.
“Oh come on, don't be like that. It wasn't that loud”, Rocinante tries to play down his mishap and shifts into reverse gear.
“That's not the point”, Law says indignantly, his head beet red. “Your music is just embarrassing! Only old people listen to that!”
Rocinante opens his mouth peevishly, but for the life of him he can't think of anything to say in reply.
...
Half an hour later, they are sitting in the Ford with three bags full of sushi burgers, warm chicken nuggets, crispy chips and ice-cold Coke, devouring their early evening snack in gluttonous silence. The Burger King's parking lot borders a country road and behind it stretches a small quarry lake, where older men usually sit on dark green folding chairs and fish. The Ford is parked on a grass-covered dirt road that almost reaches the shore of the lake.
Only occasionally does a car drive past on the country road. Otherwise it is quiet. The crickets chirp, the water ripples, it's still warm outside – a perfect golden October day.
And after Law has shoved the last chicken nugget with sweet-and-sour-sauce into his mouth, he points to his left cheek with a weighty expression. “Roci, look, I discovered this today during lunch break! I've even got two stubbles now!”
Rocinante leans over the center console and discovers two measly little “stubbles” next to Law's left ear – not stubbles, but the first signs of sideburns.
Nevertheless, Rocinante is deeply impressed and holds out his fist to Law with a grin. Law beams and, as if they've colluded, they both make hissing explosive noises as they bump their fists together.
And as Law noisily sips the last remains of his Coke, Rocinante swears to himself that he wouldn't just be a father figure to Law, but that he would be a dad to Law - the best dad.
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