The slightest gust of unanticipated news can blow her finances off-course entirely — like the $144 car registration fee she had overlooked a few months ago. “It just jumped on me — I should have known,” said Ms Tilton, 53. She has fine, platinum hair and flips easily between laughter and tears.
There is one other thing Ms Tilton faithfully records: the $50 or so she puts away each month, steady progress towards her dream of one day owning a home.
In September, she was accepted by a charity called Habitat for Humanity, which builds low-cost houses with people like Ms Tilton — the working poor who are just scraping by, yet are somehow deemed too well off for public housing. If the prize seems distant, it looms just across the street from Ms Tilton’s two-bedroom flat at the Tucson Palms apartment complex — a glamorous-sounding facility whose namesake trees are withered and whose railings have been appropriated as clothes lines. There, on the other side of Yavapai Road, the wooden frames of nine new Habitat houses are rising on concrete slabs that have taken over a vacant lot.