Tully Hart and Dorothy Hart

Tully Hart and Dorothy Hart share a mother-daughter bond shaped less by sustained care than by Dorothy’s intermittent returns and repeated departures. Tully keeps hoping that her mother’s reappearance means she is loved; each abandonment deepens the fear that people she needs will leave. In adulthood, Tully tries to protect Dorothy and to be present for Kate Mularkey, but the relationship’s defining limit remains Dorothy’s inability to provide the dependable care Tully asks of her.

An awaited return

When Dorothy reappears at Tully’s grandparents’ home, Tully is confronted with the mother she has long imagined returning. Dorothy pushes past Gran and addresses her as her “little Tallulah Rose.” Tully whispers “Mommy?” in awe: the return is not simply a visit but the arrival of the person she has waited and dreamed for. The scene makes clear how much hope Tully has invested in Dorothy before there is any evidence that the reunion will last.

The meeting takes place on Tully’s birthday. She hurries to retrieve a macaroni-and-bead necklace she made for Dorothy at Bible school the previous year, a small gift preserved through years of hope. Dorothy says she is not drunk and describes being reunited with her child as “the ultimate high.” Gran corrects her: six years have passed since Dorothy last left Tully there, when Tully was four. Dorothy’s confused response, asking whether it has been that long, sets her sense of reunion against the elapsed years Tully has lived without her.

That return does not become a lasting homecoming. Dorothy leaves Tully alone in a crowd; Tully remembers waiting and trying to be brave, telling herself that her mother will come back. She never does. The recollection of waking on an empty street, on a dirty cement stoop beside a mounted policeman, is fragmented: Tully cannot recover what happened in the intervening moments, only the abandonment and the scene that follows. The gap in memory gives the episode a form that echoes its emotional force—an abrupt disappearance where a child needs continuity.

A pattern Tully can name

Later, Tully tells Kate the history behind the wounds she has kept secret. Dorothy first left her at her grandparents’ when Tully was two, saying she was going to town for milk; she returned when Tully was four. At ten, Tully took another appearance as proof of love, only to be let go in a crowd. The next time she saw her mother was at fourteen. Tully connects these returns and disappearances to her grandparents’ practical support: Gran lets them live in the house and sends money each week, support Tully fears will last only until Dorothy leaves again.

Tully is unusually explicit about what the pattern has taught her. She expects Dorothy eventually to become bored and move on without her, and she interprets that expectation as evidence that something is wrong with herself. Kate cannot understand how a mother could act this way. The difference between their family experiences sharpens the contrast: Tully knows that Kate’s mother is not like her own, and the two girls are not starting from the same sense of what a mother can be trusted to do.

The history also helps explain why Tully protects her secrets so fiercely. She fears that telling Kate the truth might cost her the friendship; withholding it, she recognizes, could also destroy their closeness. The choice to speak is therefore not merely a disclosure of past events. It is a test of whether she can risk being known without being abandoned. Kate’s presence gives her a kind of emotional safety that Dorothy’s repeated returns have not provided.

The limits of Dorothy’s care

At Ima’s funeral, Tully spots Dorothy at the edge of the property, standing in the shade beneath the maple trees and smoking. Her tattered corduroy bellbottoms, dirty peasant blouse, and rail-thin appearance make her a striking, isolated figure at the gathering. Tully feels a leap of joy because her mother is there; even with all that has happened, Dorothy’s arrival still briefly means Tully is not alone.

That hope collapses in a direct exchange. Dorothy tells Tully, “Look at me. I can’t help you.” Tully answers, “But I need you.” Dorothy calls that need “the fucking tragedy of it,” takes another drag on her cigarette, and then disappears while mourners leave the funeral. Tully is left without an answer to the question of whether her mother loves her. The scene condenses their relationship into its central contradiction: Dorothy acknowledges Tully’s need but cannot meet it, and Tully continues to want what Dorothy says she cannot give.

Tully’s anger after Gran’s death names the losses bound together in that contradiction. When Kate asks whom she is angry at, Tully says she could choose Cloud, Gran, or God, then tells Kate that Gran died while Kate was away. Kate’s sorrow gives Tully a response she has been waiting for: someone who loves her is genuinely sorry for her. Tully breaks down as Kate holds her. The contrast does not repair the mother-daughter bond, but it shows how a dependable friend can respond to grief in the moment Dorothy cannot.

A bond repeated in later crises

As adults, Tully and Dorothy remain connected through concern and conflict rather than a settled reconciliation. When Kate is in danger and Tully steadies her, Tully’s immediate words are, “I’m right here.” After the emergency, she insists on remaining in the ambulance beside Kate and repeats the assurance. That action is not evidence that Tully and Dorothy’s relationship has healed; instead, it shows Tully offering another person the steadfast presence she had repeatedly sought from her mother.

Tully’s instinct to protect also emerges in her disagreement with Kate about Marah’s modeling-school plans. Tully promises to go with Marah and help her through it, while Kate objects that Tully is not Marah’s mother and insists that keeping her daughter safe is her responsibility. Tully replies that safety is not everything and that sometimes risk is necessary. The exchange places Tully’s supportive impulse beside a mother’s authority and anxiety, echoing the question of what care requires without implying that Tully can substitute for Dorothy—or for Kate—as a parent.

That protective impulse has a cost when Tully intervenes in Kate and Marah’s relationship on live television. She tells Kate that Kate and Marah both need help, that she is scared for them, and that Johnny begged her to intervene. Tully presents the action as care, but its public setting and Kate’s distress expose the danger of helping without honoring the other person’s privacy and agency. The episode gives the mother-daughter subject an important counterpoint: Tully’s own deprivation does not make every protective act welcome or wise.

Presence at the end of Kate’s life

When Tully visits Kate in the hospital, Johnny warns that cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that she may not know who Tully is. The warning recalls the insecurity that has run through Tully’s relationship with Dorothy: the fear that a person she loves may not recognize or remain available to her. But Tully does not withdraw. 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 the beds close together, puts on a tape of her final show, and watches it with Kate as the two friends once might have stayed up together as girls.

Kate asks Tully not to treat her as if she is dying, saying that she needs Tully to be herself in order to remember who she is. Tully’s presence is therefore not framed as a cure or an escape from death; it is a form of companionship shaped around Kate’s expressed need. The relationship between Tully and Dorothy remains marked by care that appears and vanishes, while Tully’s friendship with Kate reaches toward a different kind of intimacy: attention that stays, listens, and makes room for the other person to say what she needs.

Across these episodes, Dorothy’s repeated departures are not simply a painful chapter Tully leaves behind. They establish the emotional pattern against which Tully experiences later friendship, grief, and caregiving. Her longing for her mother persists even when she can name the pattern and anticipate its outcome. The novel’s contrast is not that friendship cancels maternal abandonment, but that dependable presence can answer some of the needs abandonment leaves behind—without erasing the original loss.