Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey

Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey become more than best friends: known to others as TullyandKate, they build a shared life that gives Tully a refuge from abandonment and gives their friendship the strength to endure losses and ruptures across more than thirty years. Their bond begins in childhood, takes on the force of a chosen family, and reaches its starkest test when Kate is dying and Tully stays beside her.

A friendship made into a shared world

As girls, the neighboring-house friends meet secretly at night and find, on the banks of the Pilchuck River, a place to smoke stolen cigarettes, cry over the lyrics of “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” and tell each other everything. By the end of one summer, their lives are so closely stitched together that others see them as a single unit, TullyandKate. The name captures both their intimacy and the way their friendship becomes a durable structure in each life: the decades bring different music, but the promises made on Firefly Lane remain.

Their childhood vision of the future is correspondingly shared. They imagine growing old together, sitting in rocking chairs on a creaking deck and laughing over their lives. The promise of lifelong friendship is not simply a hopeful phrase; it gives the relationship a form and an imagined destination. The later story repeatedly measures change against that original expectation of being there for one another, no matter what.

Trust, disclosure, and the promise of permanence

For Tully, the friendship first becomes a place of physical as well as emotional safety. When she begins to cry in front of Kate, Kate does not demand an explanation or withdraw; she hugs her. The contact is unfamiliar enough that Tully initially flinches and tries to pull away, but then clings to Kate, afraid that without her she will drift away and be lost. The scene makes visible how much ordinary affection means to a girl accustomed to being left alone.

That trust deepens when Tully tells Kate that Pat Richmond raped her. She has been holding the truth inside until it feels like a fire she cannot contain. Shame makes her avoid looking at Kate, expecting judgment, but Kate’s first response is to ask quietly whether she is okay. The exchange establishes the friendship as a form of witnessing: Tully can name what happened without the relationship turning against her, and Kate answers the disclosure with concern rather than blame.

After the friends confront the need for honesty, Kate promises they will be best friends forever and says she will always be there, no matter what. Tully asks whether that means Kate will always stay; when Kate affirms it, Tully promises the same. She experiences the exchange as the first time she has felt completely safe with someone. The vow therefore answers more than a childhood desire for closeness: for Tully, whose life has been marked by people leaving, permanence becomes something another person has explicitly offered.

Friendship as chosen family

The promise is tested by bereavement when Tully tells Kate that her grandmother has died while Kate was away. Tully admits her anger is directed at Cloud, her grandmother, and God, and Kate’s sorrowful response gives her what she has been waiting for: someone who loves her and is genuinely sorry for her loss. Tully breaks down in large, wrenching sobs while Kate holds her without trying to fill the silence. The friendship does not undo the death; it gives Tully somewhere to grieve.

It also grows beyond the two girls. After Tully has been placed with a foster family, Mrs. Mularkey tells her that Kate wants her to live with the Mularkeys. Tully cannot initially believe the offer. Mrs. Mularkey explains that living in their home means doing chores and following rules, then tells Tully she cannot bear to send her back to the life she has endured. Tully cries for her grandmother, the foster family, and Cloud, and hands over the crumpled, half-empty pack of cigarettes she has been carrying. Mrs. Mularkey welcomes her into the family and embraces her.

Tully remembers this welcome as the beginning of becoming someone new. In the Mularkey home, she does not need to keep secrets, lie, or pretend to be somebody else; no one treats her as unwanted or not good enough. She later regards the senior year when she is inseparable from Kate and part of the family as the best year of her life. The friendship’s shelter is thus both intimate and practical: Kate’s bond with Tully opens the way to a household where she can belong.

Care through rupture and illness

The relationship’s endurance does not mean that it remains untested. In adulthood, the narrative presents Tully and Kate’s friendship alongside the possibility of serious conflict and separation, showing that the childhood vow cannot prevent every rupture. Its importance lies instead in the ways care reappears when the other is most vulnerable. When Kate is badly injured and being taken to hospital, Tully insists on staying in the ambulance and repeats that she is right there. After the hospital staff hurry Kate away, Tully watches her best friend disappear into the building and feels the full force of what is happening. The repeated assurance turns the old promise into an immediate act of presence.

Years later, the cancer has affected Kate’s brain, and Johnny warns Tully that Kate’s faculties have been impaired. She may have good moments and bad ones, and she may not recognize Tully. The warning places a limit on what friendship can accomplish: Tully can come to Kate, but she cannot count on being recognized or met in the way she once was. Even so, she remains part of the circle caring for Kate at the hospital.

On Kate’s last night there, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place in the other bed in Kate’s room. She pushes her bed across the linoleum until it nearly touches Kate’s, then brings out a tape of her final show. The two women watch the broadcast together, like eighth-grade girls at a sleepover. The scene returns their friendship to its earliest shape—companionship built by staying close and sharing an experience—while making the closeness more urgent because Kate is dying.

The meaning of TullyandKate

The friendship’s central contradiction is that its promise sounds absolute while its history is shaped by change, grief, and the possibility of loss. Tully’s need for Kate is intensified by the abandonment she has known; Kate’s embrace, her response to Tully’s disclosure, and her family’s welcome all provide distinct forms of refuge. Later, Tully’s presence in the ambulance and beside Kate’s hospital bed shows that care is not only declared in childhood but repeatedly enacted when words cannot reverse what has happened.

TullyandKate is therefore both a name for two inseparable girls and a measure of the bond they try to preserve as their lives move beyond childhood. Their imagined old age together cannot protect them from illness or death, but the final hospital-room image recalls the promises made on Firefly Lane without pretending that friendship can defeat mortality. It can, however, make sure that Kate is not left alone at the end.