To The Pizza Delivery Person

You don’t know these people and yet you arrive with a big hot pizza in it’s keep-warm cozy.

 

You step up to the door and hear the dogs bark. The house may look swank, trimmed yard and potted flowers in matching planters, but that doesn’t mean the people inside are sober. It doesn’t mean they will have enough cash. Doesn’t mean they won’t complain about the long wait, the cold crust, the hot crust, the cold sauce. Always they complain about the cheese.

Chances are the person you just delivered to didn’t tip and the person you are about to deliver to will tip you $2 on a $30 order. Doesn’t matter if it’s summer and your car smells like greasy cardboard and sweaty dollar bills. Doesn’t matter if there’s a tornado watch. The blizzard doesn’t matter. The flash flood doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what you have had to endure or what lights you ran on the way over, they aren’t tipping.

You read Descartes on your breaks. In two years, you’ll have a degree and you can buy a car that smells like a car. In three years, you’ll have an apartment that’s not in student housing. In four years, you will meet someone and the curve of that neck and that sigh at night will charm you every time. In six years, your heart breaks--shatters, dissolves--and you think yourself unknowable. In eight years, you are in love again.

Your lover always wants to order pizza. You feel like you can never order enough. Enough to make up for all the crap the driver is going through that night. Enough to help that kid through the weekend. Enough to say this isn’t your whole life.

Two large. With everything. Extra cheese.