Carrie Blanton plays with her sons Tyler, 10, and Mathew, 21 months, in their Westerly apartment. Blanton is starting to get on her feet financially. She’s off food stamps and working, below, at Serapo, an Italian restaurant.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

WESTERLY

During the bad times, Carrie Blanton juggled her fears. If the phone rang, her stomach knotted. Was it the repo man? When the weather turned cold, she worried about finding help to buy oil so she could keep her son, Tyler, and her baby, Mathew, warm.

At night, alone and exhausted, her worst fear surfaced: Would Mathew — born a month early with Down syndrome and three holes in his heart — live? How would she get him to the doctors if the repo man snatched her car?

“It was a terrible time,” she says.

Today, Blanton lives a different life.

At 40, she moves easily between the noisy kitchen and the hungry customers at Serapo, an Italian restaurant on a busy street. The dreamy, piped-in music is decidedly old-fashioned.

“Hi, how are you?” she greets an elderly couple. “My name is Carrie, and I’ll be your server tonight.”

Today’s special?

“Chicken Napolina,” she says.

In a black blouse, with her blond hair tied in back, she is friendly and self-assured. There’s no hint of her two-year-long climb out of a dark hole, a world of food pantries, bill collectors and nightmares.

On Thanksgiving, her boss is opening the restaurant to serve meals to needy families. Blanton will be there to help. . Some will come from the local homeless shelter. “It’s karma,” says Blanton. “I want to help people out because now I’m in a position to do it.”

Her spiral into poverty happened fast. “I could see it coming, but there was nothing I could do,” she says.

Her second marriage fell apart, leaving Blanton to pay the bills on her own. A rebound relationship with a coworker left her pregnant with a child she knew would be born with Down syndrome. She kept working, waiting on tables, but her tips got smaller, the bills piled up and she was evicted from her apartment.

Mathew was born in February 2008. Blanton quit her restaurant job to care for him. He lost weight and struggled to breathe. Mathew’s father, Juan, a chef, was rarely around to help. He sometimes bought diapers or helped with the bills. It wasn’t nearly enough.

For months, she eluded the repo man until the July morning her luck ran out. He got the car she needed so badly to get her baby to the pediatrician and the Boston surgeon.

“I lived on $10 a day,” says Blanton, who fed Mathew and her 10-year-old son, Tyler, with handouts from churches and food pantries. Charities and, eventually, the government helped with the rent and heat.

“I felt trapped,” she says. But she was a single mom with two kids. “I couldn’t give up.”

Now, she is out of that hole.

She works five days a week at Serapo, a new restaurant off Granite Street.

Mathew, his heart repaired, is 21 months old and 27 pounds. He races on hands and knees across a carpeted living-room floor in her tidy second-floor apartment on High Street. Sun pours through the skylights. In her old apartment, on a dead end street, a dark stairwell led to a rotting porch.

As soon as she was sure Mathew was strong enough to be left with a sitter, Blanton looked for work.

In May, she stopped at Serapo, which had just opened.

Anna Savastano, the owner, hired her on the spot to waitress. She was impressed with Blanton’s work history and experience. A single mother herself, Savastano and Blanton connected.

“She proved herself quickly. She’s a spitfire,” says Savastano, who put Blanton in charge of the front room and wait staff soon after she got there.

Savastano isn’t new to the restaurant business. She and her ex-husband had operated a local pizza joint for five years. And her parents had run a restaurant back in Italy. But she was feeling overwhelmed before Blanton arrived.

“I had a lot on my plate and she just started shooting ideas at me,” says Savastano.

Blanton suggested ways to improve the bottom line. She also fired people who didn’t work hard.

“They call me names like The Henchman and the Dream Crusher,” says Blanton.

Restaurants, she says, are not places where you can slack off.

With a steady income, Blanton ditched her food-stamp card and cut her ties to everything but a local housing subsidy that covers part of her rent, and monthly Social Security payments for her two boys.“I’m just making it, but I feel better than when I wasn’t able to work,” she says.

“I feel like a human being again.”

Savastano came up with the idea of a Thanksgiving dinner for the needy because her restaurant is doing well and is aware of people in the area who have been laid off. “A lot of families have been hit hard by this economy, especially in South County. For just this one day, they can put their troubles aside.”

The Providence Journal told Carrie Blanton’s life story in August 2008 in a piece called “Spiraling into Poverty.”

Some readers responded harshly, criticizing her for making bad choices, especially her relationship with Juan, who is now working in Virginia.

White trash, commented someone in a chatroom on craigslist, a network of online communities.

She’ll never get off welfare, they said.

The comments stung Blanton, who had supported herself since she was 15 years old. She left a foster home as soon as she could, working two jobs –– selling shoes and burgers –– to cover the rent.

Except for a brief stint in a technical school, she worked for the next 20 years in a string of New England restaurants.

How could people call her names? she bristled.

Other readers responded with lots of gifts –– store cards, checks, baby toys and groceries –– for Blanton and her sons.

A stranger even gave her a used Jeep Cherokee so she could take Mathew to the doctors.

The gifts helped her survive the dismal days.

Blanton is happier now. But life is still a struggle.

Her Jeep needs new tires, a muffler and major frame work. “It goes crank, crank, crank when I drive it,” she says.

In the past half year, Blanton has had some medical problems of her own. Mathew has failed several hearing tests. His kidneys are up too far in his chest cavity, which could mean trouble later.

In order to work, Blanton hands over much of her income to the sitter.

And the summer crowds at Serapo are gone. Business has slowed.

Sometimes, she thinks about the bad times: The night a leaky ceiling in her old apartment fell on her, Tyler and Mathew. The Christmas before Mathew was born when all she had was $30. The weekly calls from the company hired to repossess her car.

Yet, she dreams of an even brighter future, a time when she might open her own restaurant, or sell cookies and cupcakes like other entrepreneurs, a time when Mathew is well, even a time when she can buy a home and a new car, one “without four holes in the muffler.”

“I take it a day at a time. If I think past that, I panic. There are so many things that can go wrong.”

Nothing is going wrong, right now. Mathew is starting to stand and walk.

He says “Dada” instead of “Mama,” which drives Blanton crazy. But he’s learning sign language, so he can communicate with his mom.

He bangs his pudgy hands together, a sign for “more.”

“He’s doing a lot,” says one of the therapists who visits frequently.

Blanton smiles.

Mathew, wearing a shirt that says Slam Dunk, smiles, too, and laughs.

He scoots over to where his big brother sits on the floor. Then he stands, wobbling and beaming.

On the wall behind him hangs a sign Blanton purchased at a Christmas Tree Shop. Welcome Home, it says.

pdavis@projo.com