Bud Mularkey

Bud Mularkey is Kate Mularkey’s father, a quiet, affectionate presence in the household that becomes a home for Tully Hart. He is remembered less for grand declarations than for routine gestures: a lap offered to his daughter, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear, and a welcome extended to the neighbor who has nowhere else to feel secure. Across the novel, that dependable warmth makes him part of the family Tully longs for, though it cannot guarantee that she will always belong to it.

Identity and Family Life

Bud is a family-centered father whose daily life is marked by work and affection. Kate finds him downstairs with the newspaper and responds to his invitation to hug him by settling into his lap, her cheek against the rough wool of his shirt. He asks how school is going and listens imperfectly: when Kate once answered that it was not going well, he failed to hear the distress in her words. His work helps explain that inattention. He is taking double shifts at Boeing so the family can afford its yearly camping trip, and Kate knows how tired he looks.

That shortfall does not define their bond. Kate loves him all the more for his quiet constancy: unlike her mother, he does not yell, demand that she pay attention, or insist that she be responsible for her own happiness. His care is neither elaborate nor especially verbal, but it offers Kate a durable assurance that he will go on loving her. The contrast between what he misses and what he reliably gives makes his fatherhood affectionate without making him idealized.

Welcoming Tully into the Household

When Tully is brought into the Mularkey home, Bud is introduced to her as the girl from next door. He puts down his drink, smiles, and makes clear that the family has already heard about her; then he tells her he is glad she is there. For Tully, the welcome carries unusual weight. The house is filled with family photographs, while her own home is marked by overflowing ashtrays and empty cigarette packs. The visual contrast makes the Mularkeys’ ordinary domestic life a tangible image of what she has been missing.

Bud’s welcome is reinforced by the way he and Margie draw close together in the La-Z-Boy, bending their heads toward one another. Tully watches, overcome by a longing for the family she might have had. Rather than turn away, she asks whether they are watching the news; Bud answers that they never miss it. The small exchange lets her remain near them and join, however tentatively, in a household ritual. His home offers more than kind words: it gives Tully a place beside the routines and bonds she envies.

That welcome becomes part of a pattern of inclusion. When Kate leaves for college, the family makes its familiar group embrace, and Tully hangs back until Margie calls her into it. She rushes forward and lets them all hold her. Bud is present in the family departure, and the invitation confirms that she is not merely a visitor at the edge of Kate’s life. The embrace temporarily makes her part of the family’s shared milestone.

Care During Grief and Crisis

Bud’s quiet, practical presence helps create the conditions in which Tully can seek care from the Mularkeys. When Kate asks her whether she is all right, Tully stiffens and then begins to cry. Kate hugs her; Tully initially flinches at the unfamiliar contact, then clings to her, afraid that without Kate she will be lost. Bud is not the person who gives that embrace, but the household he shares with Margie and Kate is the setting in which Tully can begin to experience closeness as shelter rather than something foreign.

The same pattern returns when Kate comes back after being away and Tully tells her that her grandmother has died. Kate holds her while she breaks into great sobs. Tully had been waiting for someone who loved her to be truly sorry for her loss; Kate’s response supplies that comfort, and Bud’s family is again the place where Tully’s grief can be received. These moments distinguish the care Bud helps embody from a dramatic rescue: belonging is offered through repeated, ordinary acts of welcome and through the relationships the household sustains.

During Kate’s medical emergency, Tully insists on staying beside her in the ambulance and repeats that she is there. When the ambulance reaches the hospital, the staff hurry Kate inside and Tully is left at the open doorway, watching her best friend disappear into the hospital. Later, as Kate’s cancer affects her faculties, Bud is among the family members gathered around her. Margie tells Tully that only one person may enter at a time and that Bud is inside with Kate. His presence at her bedside places him within the family’s direct care for Kate, even as the restriction leaves Tully waiting outside.

The Limits of Chosen Belonging

Bud’s place in Tully’s life is bound to the larger Mularkey family: the family whose warmth has offered her a substitute home is also Kate’s family, with its own loyalties and obligations. When Tully confronts the fact that her mother’s actions were a crime, Margie acknowledges the harm but says Bud is calling her and that she needs to go. Tully hangs up without saying goodbye and feels the truth settle heavily: everyone she loves belongs to Kate’s family, and when the moment demands a choice, they take sides. Bud is not shown making that choice in this exchange, but his call is the immediate reason Margie must leave. The scene gives painful complexity to the security his household once seemed to promise.

That tension does not erase Bud’s welcome or the tenderness of his home. Rather, it reveals the difference between being embraced into a family and possessing a claim on it equal to the bonds that already hold it together. Bud’s ordinary kindness helps make Tully’s chosen family possible; the later fracture shows that such belonging can be real and sustaining without being unconditional or free of limits.

Narrative Significance

Bud functions as a measure of the quiet care Tully has lacked and as a background presence in the Mularkeys’ life together. The novel makes his character legible through small, concrete actions rather than a separate account of his ambitions: working double shifts for a family camping trip, receiving Tully warmly, and remaining with Kate during a hospital crisis. These details connect household security to labor, routine, and shared responsibility.

His significance is also relational. Kate’s loving memory of her father, Tully’s longing as she watches him with Margie, and Tully’s later recognition that the people she loves are part of Kate’s family all position Bud at the intersection of affection and belonging. He helps show why the Mularkey home can feel like a refuge, and why that refuge remains inseparable from a family whose center is Kate.