“My bug guy, my pop guy, my towel guy, my window washer,” she says. Cable. Orlando Bread. Port Clinton Fish.

She tries to lower expenses. When her vexing electric bill shot up a while back, she sold off several appliances and bought a cheaper, more energy-efficient freezer. She spent Mother’s Day shopping for wholesale bargains on eggs and dish soap. She bounces from Rural King to Sam’s Club to Giant Eagle, looking for the cheapest coffee.

She cannot afford health insurance, she says; it would be $1,500 a month for her and her out-of-work husband, Tim, who has congestive heart failure at 57. A while back, she tore something in her left shoulder while pulling a heavy box of bleach down from a shelf at Sam’s Club. Never had it fixed.

Life has become cyclical. Every night, Donna returns to her modest two-story house in Elyria, with its untidy backyard that she never has the time or the energy to reclaim, and stares at the television until sleep comes. Every morning, she awakens to worries, beginning with what to offer for lunch.

Every day, after expenses, there is not much left — though, now and then, she peels off $20 to gamble at a video-lottery place she calls “the joint.” And every week, after lunch, here comes Mark Ondrejech, the affable salesman for US Foods, a wholesale supplier, to provide counsel. He sits with her at a back table, opens his laptop and goes down his list.

“All your dressings are good this week? Meat broth, chicken broth, French fries? Onion rings, sauerkraut? Ketchup packets, crackers, chip bags? Foam containers are good? Dinner napkins, straws — grape tomatoes. Steak fries, cinnamon rolls. ”

But Donna is ordering less and less from US Foods. She has raised her prices ever so slightly — two eggs and toast went from $1.99 to $2.39 — in trying to strike the proper balance between fair profit and customer contentment. She is making her daughter and granddaughter occasionally pay for what they eat. She is holding on for better days, amid news that a new Taco Bell is replacing a downtown apartment building once occupied by Sherwood Anderson.