Margie Mularkey

Margie Mularkey is Kate’s mother, a wife and homemaker whose experience of a troubled childhood gives her a particular tenderness toward Tully Hart. She does not offer Tully a solution to every loss, but she gives her something more immediate: a place in the family, freedom from shame about her mother, and a durable form of maternal affection. Across the novel, Margie’s attention to grief and vulnerability makes her a quiet counterweight to abandonment, while her counsel helps Tully understand where her care is most needed.

Identity and Family Background

Margie is part of the Mularkey household, alongside her husband, Bud, and children including Kate. Her daughter calls her Mom, while Tully and the family also refer to her as Mrs. Mularkey or Mrs. M. The novel presents her as a wife and homemaker, but not as a merely domestic figure: her understanding of what people need comes from a history of her own, and she is willing to speak plainly when that understanding matters.

One Thanksgiving, the extended family arrives with the abundance and bustle of a holiday tradition. Margie’s sister Georgia and Georgia’s husband Ralph bring enough food to feed a community; their children, now grown, are not with them that year. Georgia has poured herself a drink before greeting anyone. The details give the gathering a lived-in, slightly unsettled texture, and place Margie within a family whose adult members carry their own histories and changing circumstances.

A Welcome for Tully

Margie’s most consequential early act toward Tully grows from recognition rather than judgment. She tells Tully that her own father was a fall-down drunk, known throughout town, and mean. Margie’s sister Georgia had to go to the tavern on Friday and Saturday nights to drag him home. She remembers the shame of being seen through a parent’s behavior, but has learned to separate a child’s identity from a mother’s choices: Tully is not responsible for how Cloud lives, Margie tells her, and has nothing to be ashamed of. She urges Tully to dream big, pointing to television journalist Jean Enersen as an example of a woman who pursued what she wanted.

Margie’s advice is followed by action. After Ima dies while Cloud is away, Tully faces the loss of her grandmother and the return of her mother’s instability. Margie helps make the family’s response concrete: Tully is to live with the Mularkeys. In the silence after that offer is voiced, Margie draws Tully into her arms and welcomes her into the family. The embrace does not erase the losses that brought Tully there; it gives her a household willing to receive her while she grieves.

Her welcome is not simply a one-time gesture. When Kate is away from home and cannot speak with Margie, Kate waits nearly an hour for her turn in the phone room and tells her mother that Tully will not talk to her. The moment shows the strain that can enter the family’s closest relationships, as well as Margie’s place as someone Kate turns to when her friendship with Tully has become painful and uncertain.

Care Through Grief and Crisis

Margie’s response to loss remains attentive to the person experiencing it. When Kate is hospitalized, Margie sits beside her sleeping daughter in a small green room overlooking the parking lot, reading a paperback and moving her lips as she reads. The understated scene locates care in presence: Margie stays near Kate without making the vigil into a performance.

She also recognizes that another person’s grief cannot be dismissed by comparisons or consolation. Speaking to Tully about miscarriage, Margie says that four months is not early, and recalls that people who have not miscarried often say so. Bud had said it to her twice. For Margie, the loss never felt like a blessing; it felt like losing someone she loved. By connecting her own experience to Tully’s, she offers recognition rather than instruction and acknowledges a bereavement that other people have minimized.

Margie’s protective instinct is visible in smaller, sharply defined moments, too. At a hospital visit, she appears at the door in a jean skirt and plaid blouse and tells the visitors that the nurse has allowed five more minutes before they must leave. Her practical intervention respects the limits of the situation while making room for a little more time together. When Kate is dying, Margie again supplies essential context: after she leaves the room, Johnny tells Tully that Kate’s brain cancer has affected her faculties, that she is fragile, and that she has good moments and not-so-good ones. Margie’s presence in that family circle belongs to a wider effort to care for Kate without mistaking illness-related vulnerability for the whole of who she is.

Counsel, Boundaries, and Relationships

Margie’s care is loving but not indiscriminate agreement. When Tully wants to help Marah, Margie tells her that Kate has the right to try to protect her daughter. She understands that Tully’s concern may be sincere and still resist the idea that good intentions automatically justify intervention. Rather than treating the immediate worry about Marah as the whole problem, Margie identifies Kate as the person who needs Tully now. Her judgment redirects the friendship toward its actual point of strain.

That counsel matters because Tully and Kate’s relationship can pull Tully between loyalty and professional instinct. When Tully considers making Kate’s situation into news, she tells Kate that it is news and that an exclusive might allow her to protect her. Margie’s advice elsewhere in the family story offers a different measure of protection: attend to what Kate needs as a person, and respect her right to decide how her daughter is safeguarded. Margie does not erase the conflict between friendship and journalism, but she sees that the person at its center is Kate.

Her bond with Tully is explicitly maternal, though it does not replace Tully’s complicated relationship with Cloud. At a later moment, Margie tells Tully that she loves her like a daughter, then adds a qualification. The sentence holds affection and a boundary together: Margie claims Tully as family while leaving room for a difficult truth or limit. When trouble brings Tully back to the Mularkey home, she is told she may stay as long as she wants. Bud calls Margie downstairs with the announcement that trouble is there, then greets Tully with a smile that draws one from her in return. The family’s welcome is not confined to a formal declaration; it is renewed through ordinary acts of shelter and recognition.

Work, Ambition, and Legacy

Margie’s response to Kate’s writing reveals both pride in her daughter and a different life she herself did not pursue. She tells Kate she is proud of her and that she had always wanted to find something like writing for herself, though she made afghans instead. The remark does not diminish either activity. It places Kate’s creative work beside Margie’s own practical making, while allowing Margie to acknowledge an unrealized desire without making it a demand on her daughter.

Tully also hears from another woman in journalism that a career can exact a cost: Edna Guber describes a life in which breaking news took precedence over marriage and children, and says she loved the freedom of having lived where she wanted and doing work that mattered. Margie’s family life offers a contrasting form of meaning, grounded in welcome, loyalty, and care. The novel does not present her path as a simple answer to the question of whether a woman can have both career and family. Instead, Margie’s significance lies in what she makes possible for others: a home that can absorb an abandoned teenager, a mother who can name grief without minimizing it, and a lasting attachment that remains present when Kate’s illness and death make ordinary reassurance inadequate.

Margie at Kate’s Deathbed

On Kate’s last night in the hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place in the other bed. She pushes it across the linoleum until it nearly touches Kate’s and brings a recording of her last show. Margie’s role in this final stretch is part of the family’s intimate circle around Kate, whose brain cancer has made her faculties change from moment to moment. The care around Kate requires attention both to the woman she has been and to the vulnerability of her present condition.

Kate asks Tully to treat her as if she is dying and to be herself, because that is how Kate remembers who she is. Margie’s earlier actions have prepared the emotional ground for such honesty: she has treated loss as real, made space for grief without forcing a comforting interpretation, and called Tully back to Kate when protection and loyalty threatened to become confused. Her maternal bond with Tully does not end when Tully leaves the Mularkey home; it remains one of the relationships through which the novel imagines family as something built by repeated acts of attention.