From Girl Scout to grocery store clerk, firearms instructor to special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and eventually to freelance writer, Chris Roberts chronicles her true-life adventures and misadventures, courting rituals and second chances, extra heartbeats and lessons learned.

In this candid and witty collection of essays, Roberts recaps her first fifty years with wry humor, looking back on her blue-collar upbringing in a troubled home, where she and her brothers banded together to survive a violent father and an alcoholic mother. At the age of seventeen, Roberts fell into a career in federal law enforcement and found herself in a place where women were not welcome and where co-workers could be as hostile as the criminals she investigated.

Roberts pinpoints the ridiculous amidst the sublime and the dignified in the downright embarrassing as she recounts a fated meeting with the man who would become her husband, the forty-three-second shortcoming that kept her out of the FBI, a late-in-life introduction to motherhood, and the burial of her mother's ashes at sea.

Whether she's traveling to Egypt or changing the light bulb on an appliance, Roberts brings us into her world, where anything that can go wrong probably will and where laughter usually saves the day.