Rick and Robbie

It was a brilliant mid-July morning when the shrill chime of the door bell woke me up. It was a Thursday, around 9:00 am. I should have been at work already, but the siren song of my king-sized and memory-foam topped bed had overpowered me. Any other day I probably would have ignored the bell, but even in my addled state I seemed to remember that I was expecting someone.

So, I drunkenly donned my bathrobe and stumbled down the stairs to the entryway. The frosted glass in the front door blazed in the morning sun as I opened it and stuck my head out. I squinted hard; my pupils narrowed in the blinding light, and the fuzzy image of a man standing on my porch slow came into focus.

He was six feet tall, skinny as a rail, and tan as a leather belt. A dingy wife beater hugged his wiry frame, and oversized coke bottle lenses enlarged each eye, the lenses joined along the top by a horizontal bar spanning the forehead that was popular in the 80’s. There was a slowly smoldering cigarette in his left hand hand, and as he reached up to take a drag, I noticed that he was missing his two front teeth.

And that’s when he said, “I’m Rick. I’m here to install your windows.” He then pointed over to another smoking companion underneath my crab apple tree. “An’ that’s Robbie. He’s helping me.”