Abandonment and a mother’s absence

Abandonment and a mother’s absence are not a single episode in Tully Hart’s life but a recurring condition that teaches her to expect love to vanish without warning. The novel gives that condition a concrete beginning in a crowd where a child waits for her mother to return, then follows its effects through Tully’s fear of being left, her hope whenever her mother reappears, and her reliance on Kate Mularkey’s friendship. Its central contrast is between a mother who repeatedly cannot stay and a friend who makes care present through touch, listening, and finally bedside companionship.

The First Abandonment

At ten, Tully waits at a curb after losing sight of her mother in a crowd. She tells herself that her mother will come back, trying to be brave as tears run down her face. The promise lasts only as long as the waiting: her mother does not return. The episode makes absence an experience the child must interpret before she has any explanation for it. Rather than conclude that her mother has failed her, Tully concludes that she herself has done something wrong.

The memory is marked by gaps. For years, Tully cannot recover what happened after she waited; the people around her blur into a cloud, and what remains is waking on a dirty cement stoop beside an empty street, with a policeman on horseback looking down at her. He takes her to the house on Queen Anne Hill, where her grandmother holds her, kisses her cheek, and tells her that the abandonment was not Tully’s fault. That immediate care does not erase the child’s private explanation. Tully still believes she has been bad and imagines that, next time, she will try harder, become president, and never say she is sorry again. The fragmentary recollection and the child’s bargain with an absent parent show how abandonment becomes an enduring story about her own supposed unworthiness.

A Pattern of Returns and Departures

Later, Tully explains to Kate that the first separation began when she was two: her mother left her at her grandparents’ house to go to town for milk and did not come back until Tully was four. At ten, her mother returned, and Tully mistook the reunion for proof of love; that time, she was let go in a crowd. She did not see her mother again until she was fourteen. Meanwhile, her grandmother lets the two of them live in the house and sends money every week. Tully sees this support as temporary, lasting only until her mother leaves again—which, she is certain, will happen.

The sequence teaches Tully to read each reunion against the history of previous departures. When she tells Kate that this is the longest she has ever spent with her mother, she does not treat their present closeness as security. She expects her mother to become bored and move on without her. The prospect of being left is so familiar that Tully turns it inward, saying she thinks something is wrong with her. Kate rejects that conclusion, telling Tully there is nothing wrong with her and placing responsibility on the abandoning parent instead. Their exchange distinguishes the fact of a mother’s absence from the child’s mistaken belief that she caused it.

Hope, Disclosure, and the Limits of Maternal Care

When Tully sees her mother, Cloud, standing by the edge of a property in the shade of maple trees, smoking a cigarette, hope briefly overtakes caution. Tully feels she is no longer alone and runs toward her, ready to forgive the missing years and earlier abandonments because Cloud has returned when she needs her. The reunion does not become the rescue Tully longs for. Cloud tells her to look at her and says she cannot help; when Tully answers that she needs her, Cloud calls that need a tragedy. Tully’s longing is plain, but so is the limit of what her mother will offer. The return renews the bond without making it dependable.

The consequences also shape what Tully can tell other people. After being raped, she struggles to put the truth into words, fearing that if she tells Kate and then loses her friendship, the loss will be unbearable. Yet withholding the truth would also cost her the friendship. Tully finally tells Kate what happened. Shame makes her avoid looking at Kate, and she waits for judgment; instead, Kate quietly asks whether she is okay. Earlier, when Kate approaches her, Tully insists she is fine until, to her horror, she begins to cry. Kate hugs her without requiring an explanation. The embrace is startling because touch feels unfamiliar to Tully, but she finds herself clinging to Kate, afraid that without her she will drift away and be lost. In this friendship, being witnessed does not depend on Tully first making herself invulnerable or earning affection by being good.

Friendship as Care, Not Cure

Kate’s support recurs in grief as well as in the aftermath of violence. Tully tells her that she is angry with Cloud, her grandmother, and God, then reveals that her grandmother died while Kate was away. What she has been waiting for is not a solution but someone who loves her and is genuinely sorry for her loss. As Tully breaks into sobs, Kate holds her and lets her cry without speaking. The scene answers the earlier abandonment not by pretending the absent mother has changed, but by giving Tully a companion who stays with her grief.

The distinction between Cloud and Kate remains important: Kate’s friendship cannot undo the years of absence or guarantee that Tully will never again fear losing someone. It does, however, offer a different experience of need. Tully can disclose painful truths and receive a response rather than rejection. The novel makes this care concrete through repeated gestures—Kate approaching, embracing, listening, and holding Tully—as the counterpoint to a mother’s departures.

Absence at the End of Life

The pattern of care reaches its starkest reversal when Kate is dying. Cancer in her brain has affected her faculties, Johnny warns Tully, and Kate may not know who she is. The possibility makes recognition uncertain at the very point when Tully most wants to be present. Her history of maternal absence gives that uncertainty particular force, but the scene is not a repetition of childhood: Tully stays rather than waits for someone else to decide whether she will be recognized.

After announcing that real life is with friends and family, and that she has a family who needs her, Tully leaves her television show. On Kate’s last night in the hospital, she persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place in the other bed. She pushes her bed across the linoleum until it nearly touches Kate’s, then brings a tape of her final broadcast. They watch it together like eighth-grade girls at a sleepover. The action is a quiet answer to the old scene of a child stranded in a crowd: this time, closeness is chosen and sustained, and Tully’s place beside someone she loves is not conditional on being needed as a performer. Abandonment remains part of her history, but the novel’s closing acts of friendship show that it does not dictate every form of belonging she can know.