"We're down to one meal a day," she says.
The bright light of her bare fridge reveals a carton of milk, some eggs, and half an onion. The freezer is empty except for three frozen burritos and a bag of onion rings.
She's tired of hearing the adage, "beggars can't be choosers." That's a comfort only to the people who clean out their cupboards and donate food that should be thrown out.
When help arrives from food pantries, too often it's canned milk that expired two years ago, a rusty can of Spam, a half-empty box of spaghetti. One box of bread crumbs came with a coupon that had expired eight years earlier. She was afraid to eat them.
Even good cans of soup aren't enough to live on.
"You've got to have meat once in a while, a salad, an apple," she says.
Rita cleans four apartment buildings in exchange for a $335 rent discount. That leaves $250 of rent to pay, plus phone, utilities and food. She shares the two-bedroom apartment in Bedford with a son who has schizophrenia and cannot work. Their only income is his $552 monthly disability check.
She leads me into the empty laundry room to talk. Rita, who is 54, doesn't want her son to know she's talking to a reporter.
"I don't want to get his hopes up," she whispers.
Rita stands near the washers and dryers she cleans. The room is immaculate. No lint, no dust, not a drop of spilled detergent.
"I want a job," she whispers. "I'd like an educated person's job making $10 an hour."
She applies for jobs but says her appearance scares employers away. Dark brown circles underline her amber eyes. A front tooth fell out of her top dentures. Her bottom teeth rotted out. She had no insurance to save them and no money to pull them.
She hands me her driver's license to show me how she used to look when she was happy, when she wasn't hungry. In the photo, she's almost smiling.
"I used to have spirit and spunk," she says. "It's all gone."
A lifetime ago, she lived in a Seven Hills five-bedroom home with three baths and a yard that required a riding mower. Then her husband took to drinking. One day he got so mean, he broke her nose. She fled.
Life slid downhill. Her '84 Olds died two years ago. The seat fell out on the way to the junkyard. All the furniture in her apartment came from the curb. She wears thrift-store clothes, right down to her bra.
She has no family, no friends. She lists every agency and church she has called for help.
Depression is Rita's biggest foe. She called a hospital for help but didn't have Medicaid. To get Medicaid, she needed a medical evaluation. It cost $479.
A black trash bag covers one window.
"I don't want to see sunshine," she says. It's too sad."
She can't stand to see her neighbors coming home with bag after bag of groceries.
"It's not like you want the world," she says. "You want to eat."
I called the St. Vincent de Paul Society, whose mission it is to help the poorest of the poor. Volunteer Frank Washkp promised to bring Rita some food.
"There are a lot of people just like her," he said. "But there's no way to help the people at the low end without the people in the middle or high end giving something up."
Something more than expired milk or rusty cans of Spam.