A Family At The Brink

It's just a few blocks from her home in Endicott, New York -- but this is a walk Brenda Hudy has never made.

"I heard that you had a food pantry here," Brenda says as she stands outside a door to a church. "… and I'm here to get help."

It's the wrong door, but the right place: "Mother Teresa's Cupboard."

"Hi, how are you?" asks Mary Roma, the Director of Mother Teresa's Cupboard.

"Could be better," Brenda says.

"I know, I know," Mary says. "It's not easy."

It's not easy because it's Brenda's first-ever trip to a food pantry, reports CBS News correspondent Seth Doane.

"The only requirement for you coming here is that you need food," Mary says.

"Why do you think it's so hard?" Doane asks. "Just the uncertainty?"

"Yeah, of what's going to happen," Brenda says tearfully. "Because with the house foreclosing and having trouble buying food … sorry, it just makes it really hard."

Just how hard was clear the night before as Brenda prepared dinner for her family. She shows Doane her nearly empty cupboard.

Brenda and her husband Mark try to keep things normal for their growing boys -- Kyle and Brandon. Normal used to be a comfortable middle-class life making $70,000, until Mark fell off a ladder at work installing cable. He was a subcontractor and didn't have insurance.

"It feels like someone is just taking my muscles in my leg and just is twisting them like a cloth," Mark says.

He now suffers from a painful nerve condition called RSD.

"I wasn't broke two years ago," he says. "I worked and I worked every day and I worked hard, and now I can't."

So Brenda does work part-time cleaning a nearby church. Combined with Mark's disability check, they bring in less than $25,000 a year.

"We've had to sell a lot of things," Mark says.

The first to go were vacations and motorcycles.

"A few weeks ago we did have no money," Brenda says. "to go and buy food so we went to our local pawn shop."

But that didn't make much of a dent, and now they're about to lose their electricity and house.

"This electricity notice is for 12 days from now," Doane says. "The foreclosure, same date, date before, it's all right around the corner."

"Right, which is very difficult to even want to face," Brenda says.

They have no idea where they'll be next week. At least today Brenda was able to find some food and some comfort, too.