Chili and Chances

The badge came in the mail on a Tuesday, and Franklin held it out to me like it was a medal. It was a plastic thing with a clip on the back, CHILI COOK-OFF VOLUNTEER printed in red block letters, and he was grinning at me over the top of it the way he does when he's already thought three steps ahead of me.

"You're going to look so good in that apron," he said.

I'm thirty-four, for anybody keeping track, and I've been a welder for most of my working life, which means I have never once in my life been handed a volunteer badge for anything. I married Franklin two years ago, when I was thirty-two and he was thirty, and we met at trade school, of all places, him studying aquarium systems and me studying fabrication. Two years married, six months in Wisconsin, and I still knew maybe four people in the whole county. So when Lynda from the campsite store asked for help with her chili cook-off, I said yes before I even thought about it.

Franklin watched me clip the badge on and kept grinning.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." He was still grinning. "I just like watching people notice you. You never notice them noticing."

That is a thing about us I should probably get out early, because it matters later. We had started talking, that spring, about wanting something neither of us had a clean word for. Not swinging, exactly, or not only that. Franklin liked the idea of watching me be wanted by somebody else. I liked the idea of him seeing it happen. We had never done anything about it, just talked about it in the dark with our hands busy, but it sat there between us like a coin on a dresser, waiting to be picked up or put in a drawer. He had mentioned the cook-off dance twice that week, casual as anything, and I had the suspicion he was thinking about that coin.

I didn't say any of that out loud. I said, "It's chili, not a fashion show," and he laughed and kissed the top of my head, and that constituted the entire conversation, at least the part we had out loud.

Saturday was hot and dry, the kind of late-summer day where the river ford goes low and glassy and you can see every stone on the bottom. The campsite fills up with tents and a few of the little cabins get rented, and by noon the pavilion smelled like cumin and browned meat and somebody's burning onions. I drove over early, leaving Franklin to finish feeding fish and come later, and found Lynda directing traffic in front of her general store like someone who had done this ten times, because she had.

"You must be Lisa." She stuck out a hand. "Franklin's wife. The welder."

"That's me."

"Oh, thank God, someone who can fix things." She handed me a folding table. "Nine of these need to go in the tasting tent, and then we need bowls, spoons, cups, and about a thousand little voting tickets. You ready?"

I was ready. I carried tables and set them in rows under the big white tent and I got to say hello to maybe two dozen people in the space of an hour, which for me was a record. A retired guy named Hollis who judged the contest every year. A family from two sites over with three kids who all wanted to help carry spoons. A woman named Iris who made pickled eggs and sold them out of a cooler every August and remembered everybody's preference. They all asked where I was from, and I said the town over, and they all said oh, the welder, Lynda told us about you, and I felt this strange warmth in my chest I couldn't quite name for a while.

Then I named it. It was being known. Being new and noticed at the same time. I'd spent six months as the quiet woman at the end of the gravel road, and here were people who already had a slot for me in their heads. The welder. Franklin's wife. Lisa. It fit like a glove that had been broken in by somebody else, a little stiff but warm.

Franklin showed up around two, when the tasting started, and I caught his eye across the campsite from behind the serving table. He'd changed into that green shirt I like, the soft one, and he didn't come straight over. He found a spot in the crowd instead, maybe thirty feet away, cup of lemonade in hand, and just watched me.

And here is where I admit the next part, because it's the part that surprises me still. Being watched by him, right there in the open, in daylight, with all those strangers around, did something to my skin. It prickled. It prickled from the back of my neck down across my shoulders, and I kept ladling chili like I was any ordinary person and thinking, well. Well, well. So it works like that even out here.

The tasting tent had eleven contestants that year. Eleven crock pots and stockpots lined up behind my table, each with a number and a paper flag, and I was given a stack of voting tickets and instructions to keep the line moving. The line did not want to move. Everybody in Wisconsin has an opinion about chili, and they all wanted to share it with me.

Contestant number seven was a fellow named Ray, up from Green Bay somewhere, cooking a venison chili he said had won him four second-place ribbons and zero firsts.

"Judges are cowards," he told me, leaning on the table. "They can't handle heat. You look like you could handle heat."

"I weld for a living," I said. "Heat's my whole job."

"See, that's what I'm talking about." He grinned. He was maybe forty, sunburned forearms, wedding ring gone but a tan line there, friendly in a way I could tell was just friendly. "One ticket says you try mine before the crowd gets to it."

"I have to stay neutral," I said, and then I laughed, because it was a ridiculous thing to say over a spoonful of chili, and he laughed too, and I felt Franklin's eyes on the two of us from across the tent as a hand pressed between my shoulder blades.

I gave Ray his spoon back and he moved down the line, and I stood there a second with my pulse doing things I don't usually let my pulse do in public. Not because of Ray. Ray was nice. It was because I knew what Franklin was doing over there. He was watching me be charming with a stranger, watching a stranger flirt with me, and he was enjoying it, and I was enjoying him enjoying it, and we had not said one word about any of this in daylight. Ever.

The afternoon kept going like that. I ladled. I chatted. I caught Franklin's eye maybe six more times, and each time he didn't look away the way a polite person would. He just held it, half a second longer, and my skin did the prickle thing again. By the fifth crock pot I had figured out this was on purpose. By the eighth I had figured out I didn't want it to stop.

Lynda came by with a fresh sleeve of voting tickets and a look on her face.

"You're glowing," she said. "That's the sun or the company?"

"Both, probably."

"Uh huh." She glanced out at the crowd, maybe even in Franklin's direction, though I couldn't swear to it. "Dance starts at eight. Mirror ball and everything. Been hanging in that pavilion since before I bought the place."

"I heard."

"You bring your dancing shoes?" she asked, and I said I hadn't thought about it, which was a lie, because I had thought about almost nothing else all week.

Lynda ran the judging like she ran everything else, meaning she hollered until it happened. Hollis stood up at the front of the tasting tent with the results folded in his shirt pocket and made a little speech about how every year the chili got better and every year he got fuller, and then he read the names from third place up. Ray got his fifth second-place ribbon. He took it with both hands and held it up like a trout, and the crowd hollered for him, and I caught myself hollering too.

First place went to a woman named Charlene who ran the bait shop over on the county road, for a white chicken chili that I hadn't even bothered to taste, being too busy being neutral. She cried a little. Lynda hugged her and then got up on a folding chair and announced that the dance was starting, whether the band was ready or not, because the band was always ready, they just liked to be asked twice.

The pavilion was this open-sided thing with a concrete floor, and somebody had strung carnival lights along the rafters years ago, the big old-fashioned bulbs, half of them burnt out. And above it all, dead center, hung the mirror ball. When the band kicked in and Lynda killed the overheads, the mirror ball started turning and the whole floor filled up with little pieces of light. They slid across the concrete and up people's legs and across the tables where the coolers sat. It was dumb how pretty it was. I stood at the edge with a cup of punch and just looked at it for a while.

Franklin came and stood next to me. He had that look on him, the one I'd been catching all afternoon, and I knew before he opened his mouth, or I thought I did, and I was almost right.

"You've been watching me all day," I said.

"I have. You noticed."

"I noticed."

He turned his cup around in his hands a couple of times. The lights slid over his face in little dots. "So here's my thought," he said. "It's just a thought. You could dance with somebody. Somebody who isn't me. A few songs. And I'd watch."

My stomach did a slow drop, as an elevator does when it starts. "You'd watch."

"If you wanted. Only if you wanted." He was looking at the dance floor, not at me, which I understood was him giving me room to think. "We've talked about it. Sort of talked about it. In the dark, usually. I keep thinking about it in the daylight and you keep being charming at total strangers, and I keep being fine with it. More than fine."

The truth was I had been thinking the same thing since about the fourth crock pot, and I had not said it either, because some things you don't say in daylight. But he'd said it. So now it was out there, sitting between us in the punch light.

"Just dancing," I said.

"Just dancing. A few songs. Then we go home and I tell you everything I thought about while I watched, and you tell me, and we'll see what happens."

I looked at the floor. There were maybe fifteen couples on it, mostly old-timers doing something slow, the band playing some song about a truck. Ray was over by the cooler with his ribbon still pinned to his shirt, talking to Iris. He was friendly. He was safe. He thought I was charming and he had a ribbon and a tan line where a ring used to be, and none of that was a threat to anything.

"Okay," I said. "Yes. A few songs!"

Franklin exhaled like he'd been holding that breath since two o'clock. He kissed the top of my head, which I appreciated, because it was a small thing and it said we're still us, and then he went and leaned against the pavilion post where he had a good view, and I swear he arranged