Tugboat Chili

The pier at Seaspray Point smelled like rope and salt and cold diesel, and I stood at the end of it for a good two minutes before I walked any farther, because my hands were sweating and I needed a minute to talk myself down.

I'm Bridget, I'm twenty-three, and I had been living on this coast for two years doing tattoo work at a shop that paid me just enough to rent a room above a bait store. In three weeks I was moving to Halifax for a bigger shop, a bigger chair, bigger everything, and the nerves had been sitting in my chest like a stone for about a month straight. My friend Natalie said I needed to get out of my apartment before I wore a groove in the floor. So when this chili cook-off popped up on the town board, posted on a corkboard outside the hardware store like it was 1987, I signed up. And when a guy named Herman matched with me on the app the same week and said, hey, I'm running a table at that cook-off, you should come by, I figured the universe was handing me two birds with one very weird stone.

The cook-off was happening on a tugboat. That part I had not fully processed until I saw it. The Juniper, squat and rust-streaked, moored at the pier with a string of lanterns hung from the rail to the mast, glowing yellow against the early dark. October in Nova Scotia gets dark early. By six it looked like nine.

There were supposed to be eight contestants. I counted four tables still set up, and only two of them had people at them. A woman in a rain jacket was packing up her crockpot with the energy of someone who had lost and knew it. The other table had a sign taped to it that said THE BARKERY, which turned out to be a couple selling chili with dog treats on the side, which is a business model I still think about.

And then there was the tugboat, with the guy.

He was standing at a pot on the deck, stirring with a wooden spoon the size of an oar, and he was wearing an apron that said KISS THE CUTTER. I climbed the gangway before I could change my mind.

"You must be Bridget," he said. "I can tell because you're the only person left under fifty and you're holding a slow cooker like it owes you money."

It was true. I was holding my slow cooker against my hip like a shield. "That obvious, huh."

"Come on up. Watch the third step, it has opinions." He set the spoon down and shook my hand, and his grip was warm and dry. Herman Lazarus, forty-six, costume cutter for film, which I had looked up on my phone in the parking lot of the hardware store because I did not know what a costume cutter did. Apparently he cuts and sews actual costumes for actual movies, and he had worked on a handful of indie films I had half watched while tattooing a stranger's calf.

The deck of the Juniper was bigger than I expected. There was a folding table, two chairs, the big pot, and a spice rack hanging off the rail that looked like it had survived a war. "Tell me about the spice rack," I said, because it was the loudest thing on the boat and I am a coward.

"You noticed it. Good eye." He lifted a little jar of something red and held it up to the lantern light. "Flea market in Antigonish. The guy selling it swore it belonged to a cook on a cargo ship who sailed the Mediterranean for thirty years. I paid twenty dollars and I believe every word, which tells you what you need to know about me."

"So it's a story rack, not a spice rack."

"It's both. The paprika might be from 2009. The story is vintage and aged perfectly."

I laughed harder than that joke deserved, and I knew it, and I laughed anyway, because that's what the nerves did when they got a chance to leak out sideways. I set my slow cooker down next to his pot and he leaned over and peered at it the way a man inspects a jewel.

"What's the secret?" he asked.

"Chocolate. And I'm not proud of it, but there's a packet of ranch dressing in there."

"Ranch." He said it the way a priest might say a sin. "Bridget. We have known each other one week online and you confess this to me on my own deck."

"It's the chili talking. I never would have told you sober."

He ladled me a bowl of his without asking, which was fine, because I was starving, and we sat down at the folding table under the lanterns. His chili was genuinely good. Smoky, a little hot, something in it I couldn't name. "The Mediterranean cargo cook earns his twenty dollars," I admitted.

"See. And you're the fourth judge tonight, so I'm sitting at a solid four out of four. The Barkery couple voted for their own chili and against mine, so really I'm four for six, if you count the dogs."

"Do the dogs get a vote?"

"The dogs voted with their bodies. They turned around and walked to the other table. Devastating."

We ate and talked, and I learned that he had been divorced four years ago, no kids, that he rented a shop space in the town for the off-season because the film work slowed down in winter and he liked having somewhere quiet to sew, and that a friend of a friend had offered him the Juniper as a liveaboard for the season, which is how a man who makes costumes for a living ends up stirring chili on a boat in a harbor. He asked me about the shop, about Halifax, about the move, and he asked real questions, the kind where he actually waited for the answer instead of lining up his next sentence.

"So you're nervous about it," he said at one point. Not a question, really.

"A little. A lot. It's a bigger shop, better money, and I know exactly two people in the whole city." I pushed a chunk of potato around my bowl. "Two years here and I know everyone. I know which customer cries. I know which ones talk the entire appointment. In Halifax I'll be a stranger with a needle."

"That's a strange job title."

"It's going on my business cards."

He refilled my bowl without asking again, and I let him. The lanterns swung a little in the wind off the water and the light moved across the deck in slow stripes. Down the pier, the Barkery couple packed their van. The woman in the rain jacket was long gone. Somewhere behind me in the harbor a buoy clanked, off rhythm, like it was bored.

"Can I say something that will sound like a line?" Herman said. He turned his bowl slowly on the table instead of looking at me, which I appreciated. "You have hands like you work with them, and you laugh like you're checking if it's allowed. It's allowed. Just so you know."

"That's a terrible line," I said. "It's also the nicest thing anyone's said to me in about six months, so I'm keeping it."

"Keep it. I've got more, they get worse."

We sat there while the wind picked up and he went and got me a flannel shirt off a hook by the galley door, one of his, sleeves too long, and I wrapped it around myself and the chili pot ticked as it cooled and I thought, okay, this was the point where I would normally find a reason to leave. I had done it before. The stone in my chest had a routine. But I was warm, and full, and the buoy was clanking, and Herman was telling me a story about a director who wanted a period-accurate button sewn onto a stunt double at two in the morning, and I did not want to leave.

"You know the contest is basically over," he said. "We're the last two standing. Technically we should judge each other and declare a winner."

"I judge yours a nine. Judge mine."

"Ten, minus one for the ranch. Nine."

"We tied."

"Bridget," he said, and he tapped the table with one finger, "do you want to see the rest of the boat? It's not much. Sewing racks, a galley no bigger than a phone booth. But I built the galley shelves myself and I'm proud of them in a way I can't explain to anyone who doesn't make things."

The stone in my chest shifted, just a little, and made room.

"Yeah," I said. "Show me the shelves."

* * *

The inside of the Juniper was not what I expected, and I had expected a mess. Herman went down the hatch first and turned on a string of little lights along the ceiling, and the main cabin lit up in a warm yellow that made the whole space look bigger than it had any right to be. Sewing racks lined both walls, five or six of them, each one holding a half-built costume on a fabric form. Rolls of wool and canvas stood in a wooden crate in the corner like cordwood. A cutting table ran the length of one wall with a green mat on it, and above it hung scissors in a row, every pair a different size, lined up like a choir.

"So this is where the magic happens," he said, and then immediately held up a hand. "I'm sorry. That was a line. I promised worse and I delivered."

"It's a boat. Everything you say on a boat is automatically a line. There's no way around it."

The cabin actually smelled like wool and machine oil and, underneath that, faintly, chili. There was a sewing machine bolted to a small shelf, which struck me as genuinely clever, because a boat rocks and a sewing machine walks. He caught me looking at it.

"Clamped down. First week I was aboard I hadn't done it yet and the machine went across the cabin during a windy night. Scared ten years off me."

I walked down the aisle between the racks slow, because I didn't want to knock anything, and because I wanted to look at everything. The forms were padded and fabric-covered, the kind you see in tailor shops in movies, and each one wore something different. A coat with no sleeves yet. A vest half-attached to a jacket front. Something long and dark with a high collar that looked like it belonged to a pirate or a very dramatic lawyer.

"This one," I said, and touched the sleeve of the dark thing before I thought to ask.

"Careful, it pins." He came over but didn't stop me, just stood a step back while I ran my fingers down the fabric. It was a heavy twill, dyed a gray so dark it went almost black, and the seams were tiny and even, the kind of work you only get from someone who has done it for twenty years. "It's for a short film shooting in the spring. Harbor master, 1890s, spends the whole movie being upset about weather."

"You can tell he's upset about weather just from the collar."

"Right? The collar does half the acting. That's the secret nobody tells you. Costume is half the performance and the actor gets all the credit." He touched the shoulder seam himself, lightly, the way you'd touch a dog. "This is the first thing in a year I've made where I actually like the shoulder. I rebuilt it three times."

I looked at the stitching close, because I have spent the last two years looking close at things for a living, lines and edges, and I know good work when I see it. "I get that," I said. "A tattoo you like can keep you up at night. In a good way. You lie there going through the lines in your head."

"Yes. Exactly that!" He said it quick, like he was relieved, and I understood that he didn't get a lot of people who knew what that was like. A cutter on a boat in the off-season, a tattoo artist above a bait store. We were both people whose whole job was the quarter inch.

He put a kettle on in the galley, which really was as small as a phone booth, and showed me the shelves while it heated. They were good shelves. Solid pine, cut and sanded, screwed into the frame of the boat with brass brackets, and he had set a little lip along the front edge of each one so the jars wouldn't slide off when the water moved. The flea market spice rack from Antigonish sat on the second shelf, all its little glass drawers labeled in handwriting that wasn't his, the old cook's handwriting, thirty years of cargo ship meals behind it.

"You know it's probably not true," Herman said. "The thirty years. Flea market guys say that about everything."

"I know. But I'm choosing to believe it. It's better chili with a backstory."

The kettle started to make noise and he turned it off before it whistled, which I thought was considerate of the neighbors, except there were no neighbors, just water and the bored buoy. We stood in the galley doorway, which meant standing close, because the doorway was not built for two adults to stand side by side. I was aware of his shoulder about three inches from mine, and of the flannel shirt I was still wearing, and of the fact that I had not thought about the stone in my chest in a good while.