If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that I’m a wheeler and a dealer. A dreamer and a schemer, folks. You got plans? How funny, me too! Let me figure out how to combine them, complicate them, and ultimately ruin the day for both of us.

For example, I bought a bed off Facebook Marketplace a few weeks ago. The seller lived in the next state over. He was originally going to deliver it to my house for a fee but then decided my profile looked too sketchy (I have no friends and no posts because it’s my mom’s fake account that she once used to get into political fights with strangers). I was like fair enough, I do look sketchy, would you meet halfway? He agreed (scheme #1) and we planned to meet up at a Walgreens between us. Why Walgreens? Because I had a bathing suit to mail back and Walgreens is a drop-off location (scheme #2).  

The seller and I planned to meet up at 6:30pm, which you may recognize as prime time for dinner. If you’re like me, you may also recognize dinner as one of the devil’s most devious dealings. Is there any daily task more tedious, more exhausting, or more thankless than planning and preparing dinner?! No, is the answer. When we made plans to meet at 6:30, I decided my family should come along and we would get takeout on the way so Curtis and I didn’t have to cook or clean diddly (scheme #3).

We didn’t know where we would get dinner—remember: I’m a schemer, not a planner—but we drove past a pretty hopping seafood joint and I was like, bingo, that’s it. We didn’t decide on it until we’d already driven past it though, so we had to turn around. We ended up pulling into the next business to make a U-turn, and as luck would have it, it was yet another seafood joint. Again, bingo, they looked basically the same to us, so we just decided to eat there instead.

This place we ended up at was called Captain’s Clam Box*. You might be thinking “Hahaha oh damn, that poor restauranteur didn’t know what they was doing when they called their restaurant Captain’s CLAM BOX. Probably just wanted to sell some wholesome boxes of clams!” Except the restaurant also has a clam mascot named SQUIRT, and that dirty old restauranteur knew exactly what they were doing.

I’m not one for pachinko themed restaurants, but we were already there and it was busy enough, so I figured the food would be fine. We placed our order, hold the clams, and took a seat to wait. Five minutes passed, then ten, and we realized I’d need to leave to meet the Facebook fella at Walgreens. I decided to take the van and leave my husband at the restaurant with the kids, except two of the three kids demanded to come with me, so I ended up leaving Curtis and the eldest child at the Clam Box (scheme #4).

We got to Walgreens and made the Facebook bed exchange. It took a while because I had to put the bed on the roof of my van and all that. Then of course I had to go into Walgreens to try to return my bathing suit, however I’m dumb and didn’t print the label. Mildly annoying. But you know what was more than mildly annoying? When we got back to my van and the DUMBASS WOULDN’T START.

I don’t mean to trash talk, but my van really is a dumbass. Mostly because the trunk—which is not automatic, even though the sliding doors are—only opens up, I don’t know, three feet. I don’t know the technical way to measure for this, but let’s figure my van has approximately -27 (that’s negative two seven) units of head clearance. Please, I beg you, try to open the back of my dumb stupid fucking van and not give yourself a concussion.

Back to Walgreens—my van wouldn’t start because the battery was dead for the second time in two days. Really should have calculated that small issue into my scheming. I flagged down the only other people in the parking lot and asked them to help. They were willing, so they pulled into the spot next to me and we hooked up the batteries.

My battery was dead dead and needed to be hooked up for several minutes before it would start again. So while the batteries were doing their thing, I made harmless small talk with the people who were helping me.

“Thank you so much,” I said. “I would have been in trouble if you guys weren’t here! My husband’s stranded at a restaurant without a car right now. I dropped him off on the way here.”

“Oh man!” my rescuers said. “What restaurant is he at?”

“He’s eating out down at the Clam Box. You ever hear of it?”

A beat passed. “Um, yeah. Captain’s. We like it there.”

Turns out the locals don’t refer to it as THE CLAM BOX, just Captain’s. I was very embarrassed and ruined the evening for myself, my husband (he hates all schemes), and those fine strangers.

*The real restaurant is called someone else’s Clam Box, but I didn’t want this to show up if they had a Google alert set up or something.