The next story, "The Tree of Life" by Jennifer Rohn, is worth checking out too. Like "Down and Out," it is pretty sad, and the endings have a lot in common. So, I do not want to give away too much, but in "The Tree of Life" I think I spotted a kind of "logic slip", where something she tries really should not work - tragically enough! Still, it would not be a stretch to say the main character actually believes it might work, so the logic slip is not really baked into the story itself.