Some of her art quilts hang on the wall of her second-floor apartment in Central Falls. One shows Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean. Another, based on a photograph, shows a lakeside cabin. She is making a Steve McQueen quilt for her doctor’s secretary.

“It’s my sanity,” she says of her self-taught skill with fabric, beads, leather and whatever else is at hand.

She joined an online quilting group. It has been a good connection. She needs all the good connections she can make, all the small ways she can find to move beyond the close, isolated life that keeps her in that apartment for too much of the time.

She lives on a margin so fine that she has sometimes sold things online to cover the cost of toothpaste and other basics. Sometimes, the money to feed into the machines at the laundromat just isn’t there. She has used the bathtub.

She used to teach quilting at a fabric store. She might consider teaching survival skills in an economy gone south, in a state where the thinnest of safety nets has been punched full of holes.

She is 51. She has decades of working and two years of college behind her. She wanted to become a paralegal, but life’s circumstances took that possibility away.

“I worked hard my whole life from the time I was 13, always full-time jobs. I worked in factories.”

She worked in a candy factory, at Texas Instruments and at Hasbro. She had a job in quality control on the night shift, but there was no one to watch her children. She and her husband were divorced. She was forced to stay home with her children because her children cannot stay home alone.

She is among a growing number of people who have found that, just when it seemed life couldn’t get any more spirit-sapping or emotionally draining, it did. She is also one of those amazing women who find the strength to get through one hard day, knowing the next one might be even harder.

People who think they understand hard times should spend some time with her.

In a room just off the kitchen, her 23-year-old son with Down syndrome watches a wrestling channel.

Her 18-year-old son with Asperger syndrome seldom leaves the house. And in reaching his age, he has taken away his mother’s health insurance and a chunk of the family income.

It is one of those twists in the social welfare system that makes an impossible situation a little bit worse. When her youngest son turned 18, she lost the health care she was eligible for under RIteCare as the mother of a disabled child, and he lost the $327 a month he had received as part of the Family Independence Program. With her oldest son, the cutoff had come at the age of 21, so she assumed the same would hold true with her youngest. But it didn’t.

Her sons still receive $685 a month each in Supplemental Security Income benefits for the disabled.

Her ex-husband pays $60 a week in child support. That adds up to $1,610 a month for three people to live on. That leaves room for absolutely no surprises, no unexpected expenses. It means, again, a lot of time in her apartment.

She applied for S.S.I. for herself. She thought her situation might justify it. She was turned down. She says the appeal can take years.

She has no car. She needs a better place to live. She has a neighbor who wears an ankle bracelet. She needs a first-floor apartment because of the difficulty her oldest son has negotiating the stairs.

She is on a waiting list for Section 8 housing — she and a whole bunch of other people whose numbers are far greater than the available units.

Without a car, without family backup, she is closed in. She is in a situation where when something bad happens it makes something else bad happen. It is a very tough pattern to reverse.

“I have no one to call for help,” she says.

Still, she hasn’t given up. She isn’t ready to say life will never be better than that second-floor apartment and counting her money down to the dimes and nickels.

She should testify somewhere. She should sit down at a hearing on how the poor live in Rhode Island and let people know of the struggle to keep hope alive when it gets beat to hell every single day.

“I have plans,” she says. “I have goals. I just don’t have any money.”

bkerr@projo.com