Today, the rent is due.
Tomorrow the furniture payment comes due.
The rings have already been pawned for the car payment and dirty clothes continue to pile in the closets because there are no coins for the Laundromat.
Money has always been hard to come by for 54-year-old Winona Mackey Beard, but ever since the federal government stopped funding the unemployment extensions, the mounting bills and worries are making life hard.
"Each and every day, I get up and I hope the money will be on my card," she said.
Benefits started running out for thousands of jobless Hoosiers on June 6, after the U.S. Senate did not pass the bill to extend the unemployment payments. Every week, about 13,000 Indiana residents log on to the state's website and find they have exhausted their available funds, according to Marc Lotter, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.
On June 13, about 25,000 of the state's unemployed lost their assistance when the federally-funded state extended benefits program lapsed.
Beard pays attention to the news, wanting to know where the funding bill is in Congress and what issues the Senators are debating, but the reports are few and she believes, elected officials have forgotten about the many who remain out of work.
"We're doing what we're supposed to be doing but we're not getting any results," Beard said, countering a growing consensus that many of the unemployed are just too lazy to work. "What am I going to do?"
Beard's husband is currently in jail on a parole violation. She is hopeful he will get early release and be able to return to his former job, which would bring money into the household and ease some of her burdens.
For most of her life, Beard has made her living on production lines.
She began when she was 17 years old, sewing the sides and crotches of "granny panties" at a garment maker in Brooklyn, N.Y. She and her children moved to her mother's home in Vandalia, Mich., to flee an abusive relationship. Eventually she landed in Elkhart, a place she liked, in part, because of the many jobs available.
Seated on her overstuffed couch, Beard spreads her fingers and shows her hands, which are swollen and painful from the years pulling fabric, sewing, working a screw gun and performing all the other tasks she had been assigned over the years. Still, she visits manufacturers and submits applications weekly.
"There's a job for everybody," Beard said. "A nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, people need these people but they also need factory workers. That's what I do."
She was laid off from her seamstress job at a mattress factory in 2008.
Inside her small apartment, she has created a comfortable refuge. The place is clean and quiet with framed pictures on the wall and her Bible study books stacked neatly in the corner. She keeps the conversation running and offers summertime guests the chair nearest to the cooling fans.
In the past, she has relied on food stamps and welfare payments to provide for her three daughters. Yet, she said, she still held down a job.
"My mother always used to tell me, nobody gives you nothing," Beard remembered. "If you want nice things, you have to work for it."
The Senate seems poised to take another vote on Friday on the legislation that would reinstate the unemployment extensions, according to Roll Call. However, as of Wednesday night, the bill appeared to be two votes short of the number needed for passage.
That leaves Beard calling friends to borrow money, possibly getting evicted and having to move in with her youngest daughter, and still wondering what she will do.