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It begins with a text, as all epic quests these days do: Would we be going to the neighborhood chili cook-off? Specifically, was my little one going to be down

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It begins with a text, as all epic quests these days do: Would we be going to the neighborhood chili cook-off? Specifically, was my little one going to be down

It begins with a text, as all epic quests these days do: Would we be going to the neighborhood chili cook-off? Specifically, was my little one going to be down there on Sunday? He’s been besties with this clutch of kids since pre-K, kids who have become more like cousins, even siblings, than friends. So: Would Nico be down there? Asking for a bestie.

A note about Westerwood, the best neighborhood not only in Greensboro but surely in all the land: Ours is a neighborhood of sidewalks and front porches, of hundred-year-old Craftsman houses and very tall oaks. A greenway runs through it, as does a creek. Traffic is low and slow, for the most part. Our kids, and the majority of the neighborhood kids their age, have been feral since, give or take, the Christmas they were 7 — when they got new bicycles, or scooters, and could they please please please just ride down to the park?

We parents, block by block, arrived at a kind of 1980s compact: We’ll look out for each other. We’ll build a phone tree. Anymore, our neighborhood watch is mostly, Hey, your kid is down here at the swings/in the creek/in my yard. When do you need them home?

“So, um, Nico,” I said. “Hastings wants to know if you’re going to the chili cook-off.” For no good reason, we’d never been to the cook-off, had never entered, had no plans to go. We’d never really been “have Crock-Pot, will travel” people. My idea was that Nico would bike down there by himself.

Nico considered. He arranged his countenance in a fitting manner. “Only if we enter,” he said. “Only if we win.”

“Dude,” I told him. “What? We are not going to win.”

• • •

Nico hates beans. This seems a salient sidebar to an epic chili quest. Nevertheless, he committed fully to the planning, was the person who drove the cart into and out of the grocery store, was a full participant in dreaming something up. He even understood when I suggested that it might be stew, and not chili, if we didn’t include at least white beans.

We were essentially working from my grandfather’s recipe, which is a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio of tomatoes, beans, and meat, but we played fast and loose with convention. We were aiming green, aiming chicken. We were trying to make a chili that everyone in our family would eat, and if we could achieve that, we reckoned, we might place in our category, which was “Mild.”

Nico was the official taster, the suggester of spices, the wooden-spoon stirrer.

I do not care at all about prizes, about placing, but Nico was 10 at the time. He cared quite a bit.

We did some grilling the night before, got everything going the day of. Nico was the official taster, the suggester of spices, the wooden-spoon stirrer. “Daddy,” he said. “Taste this. What do you think?”

I thought our recipe might have fallen just on the spicy side of “mild,” but I also thought it was pretty decent.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Do you like it?” He thought about it. Might have rubbed his chin. “These beans,” he said, with the music swelling in the background, “are the only beans I’ve ever liked.”

• • •

Picture at least a hundred people in the park. Rows of folding tables with extension cords and slow cookers galore. Cornbread. Little paper cups. Tasting spoons. Bowls for once you’ve decided. Brave, bold judges and an indecipherable scorecard; sun low in the sky and the leaves just starting to change. Autumn, then. A festival. Not a neighborhood celebration so much as a celebration of a neighborhood. Kids everywhere. I thought, Who cares if we win?

Nico, is the answer. Nico is who. A person on a quest does not have time to stop and smell the cumin. I’d tasted most everything, and it turned out that he had, too, so when the emcee took the microphone, Nico was ready. Expectant, even.

They called third place in our category: Not us. Second: Also not us. I confess to getting a little excited. I thought we had a chance. First place, “Mild”: Not us.

The author and his son, Nico

The author harbored no illusions about winning the neighborhood chili cook-off last year. His son Nico, however, had other plans. A photo in the neighborhood newsletter captured them in the golden glow of their victory. Photography courtesy of Drew Perry

Crestfallen, Nico retired to the field to throw a tennis ball as far as he could. One must process loss as one must. I was throwing with him when we heard, over the sound system, “And now, the grand prize winner.” Though we understood, somehow, that this surely had to be one of the category winners already called, we still paused.

Friends, he was running full-out toward me, jubilant, before they even got his first name fully out into the air. This is a kid who’s grown up in the shadow of his older brother a little bit, but a kid who still, at his core, believes. He believes in everything. He thinks we’ll win a million dollars on scratch-off lottery tickets, thinks the claw at the arcade will always return a giant stuffed animal. He believed that we would win the chili cook-off, and we did. The picture that made the neighborhood newsletter, with Nico wearing a grin as wide as the greenway, is upstairs in his room right now.

The reward for completing his quest: a night in Greensboro’s O.Henry Hotel. We went, just the two of us. We rented bikes and rode around the parking lots. We took baths. We wore robes. We ordered room service. We went twice to the hotel bar, once crashing a wedding pre-party for root beers, and then once late-night for Shirley Temples and truffled fries. We had a blast.

So much of our family’s story has been his older brother’s. So many firsts have already happened by the time Nico gets there. It was astonishing, then, that night in the park, and again in the hotel, to be there to witness something that was his, only his. He’s such a cool kid. He won. I still kind of can’t believe it. I love it for him. Turns out, Nico is the chili cook-off hero we’ve needed all along.

Click here to learn how to make Nico’s Grilled Chicken Chili.

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This story was published on Oct 29, 2024

Drew Perry

Perry teaches writing at Elon University. His first novel, This Is Just Exactly Like You, was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan prize from the Center for Fiction, a Best-of-the-Year pick from The Atlanta Journal Constitution and a SIBA Okra pick. His second, Kids These Days, was an Amazon Best-of-the-Month pick and was named to Kirkus Reviews 'Winter's Best Bets' and 'Books So Funny You're Guaranteed to Laugh' lists.