Tully Hart and Margie Mularkey

Tully Hart and Margie Mularkey’s relationship is a surrogate mother-daughter bond built through acts of recognition, candor, and shelter. Margie does not simply take pity on Tully: she insists that Tully tell the truth, make her own choices, and imagine a future beyond the instability of her childhood. When Tully loses her grandmother and faces foster care, Margie turns that guidance into a home. Her welcome becomes a defining beginning for Tully, while the care she offers helps establish a pattern of chosen family that Tully carries into her lifelong friendship with Kate Mularkey.

Recognition Without Pity

Margie first encounters Tully’s vulnerability not as an abstract problem to solve but as distress that needs a human response. After Tully begins crying, Kate asks whether she is okay and then hugs her. Tully flinches at the unfamiliar contact, but cannot pull away; she clings to Kate, frightened that without her she will drift away and be lost. Margie’s importance to the bond that follows lies in the family setting that makes such care possible, but her own influence is distinct: she becomes an adult who can name Tully’s circumstances without defining Tully by them.

That distinction matters when Tully confides that she was raped. She has to steady herself before disclosing what happened, and she fears seeing shame reflected in Kate’s eyes. Kate asks quietly whether she is okay. The surrounding scenes establish the kind of response Margie’s household can offer: Tully’s painful truth does not make her an object of blame, even as Margie later holds her accountable for other choices, including lying. Care and correction coexist rather than cancel each other out.

Candor, Choice, and a Future

Margie confronts Tully about the false story that Tully’s mother is recovering from cancer. She tells her that Kate has been praying for the absent mother and has even made a small altar in her room. Tully looks down, ashamed, and fears losing the friend who has become central to her life. Margie asks whether lying to friends is acceptable and whether Tully will be a good friend to Kate or lead her into trouble. The questions are firm, but they are not a rejection: Margie makes honesty the condition for continuing the relationship, not a reason to cast Tully out.

Her advice also separates Tully’s identity from her mother’s conduct. When Tully explains that people looked at her mother with pity, Margie recognizes how much Tully has hated that look. She tells her that a mother’s life is not a reflection of her child and that Tully has nothing to be ashamed of. Instead of allowing the past to prescribe Tully’s future, Margie urges her to dream big. She points to Jean Enersen on the television as an example of a woman who has pursued what she wants, then recommends college, keeping her eyes open, doing the right thing, and trusting her friends.

Margie requires Tully to tell Kate the truth herself, insisting that it should come from Tully rather than someone else. Tully’s first impulse is to offer a promise instead, but she takes a breath and agrees. Margie then gives her a concrete chance to begin again: dinner at the Mularkeys’ home at five the following evening. Tully changes outfits repeatedly and arrives late after running across the street and up the hill. Margie greets her warmly, acknowledging that the house is loud and busy. The invitation turns her moral challenge into a practical act of inclusion: Tully is expected to return, speak honestly, and take part in family life.

A Home at the Moment of Loss

Later, after Tully’s grandmother dies, Tully tells Kate that she is angry at Cloud, Gran, and God. Kate holds her as she breaks into sobs. The grief makes the limits of Tully’s existing security unmistakable: her grandmother is gone, and her mother remains an unreliable presence. When the possibility of foster care arises, Tully dismisses Kate’s hope that another family might be found for her, saying that Kate lives in a different world. Margie answers with a possibility more immediate than hope: she tells Tully that Kate wants her to live with the Mularkeys.

Tully initially cannot believe the offer. Margie does not disguise what living in their home entails: chores, rules, and no smoking. Then she explains the reason beneath those boundaries. Knowing how hard Tully’s life has been, she cannot bear to send her back to it. The distinction is central to their relationship: Margie offers protection without pretending that family life means having no expectations. Tully’s fear gives way to relief, and she cries over the losses and instability she has endured, including Gran, the foster family, and Cloud. She hands over her crumpled, half-empty pack of cigarettes, a small but concrete sign of accepting the household’s terms.

Margie finally welcomes Tully into the family and pulls her into her arms while she cries. Tully remembers the moment across the decades as the beginning of something new. The scene transforms Margie’s earlier counsel into lived assurance: Tully is not only told that her mother’s choices do not define her; she is given a place in a family that chooses to keep her.

Care Repeated Across a Lifetime

The bond’s emotional pattern recurs when Tully faces other forms of loss and danger. When Kate returns after being away and learns that Gran has died, Tully is angry and grieving; Kate holds her and lets her cry. In a later emergency, Tully steadies Kate when she becomes dizzy, then insists on remaining beside her in the ambulance, repeating that she is there. These moments are not Margie’s actions, but they show how the Mularkey relationship has helped give Tully a durable model of presence: when someone she loves is frightened or vulnerable, she stays close.

That legacy is complicated by the limits of care and the different responsibilities the women hold. When Kate objects to Tully offering to help Marah pursue modeling, Tully says she will go with Marah. Kate responds that Tully is not Marah’s mother and that keeping her daughter safe is her own responsibility. Tully argues that safety cannot be everything and that sometimes risk is necessary. Their disagreement exposes a tension between the protective home Margie gave Tully and Tully’s instinct to widen the choices available to the next generation. Affection does not erase the distinction between being a trusted friend and being a parent.

The tension becomes sharper when Tully intervenes in Kate and Marah’s relationship on television. She tells Kate that both she and Marah need help, that Johnny begged Tully to intervene, and that Marah is afraid to confront her mother. The concern is presented as genuine, but the public intervention also crosses a boundary and leaves Kate feeling exposed. This breach contrasts with Margie’s earlier approach: Margie addressed Tully directly and asked her to take responsibility for telling Kate the truth, while Tully’s later intervention speaks about Kate’s family crisis in front of an audience. The comparison gives the relationship’s legacy both warmth and complication: being formed by care does not guarantee that Tully will always know how to offer care without overstepping.

The Chosen Family at the End

As Kate’s illness advances, Margie remains part of the family that surrounds her. Before Tully visits Kate in the hospital, Johnny warns that cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that she may not recognize Tully. The warning recalls the vulnerability at the heart of Tully and Margie’s relationship: love cannot prevent illness or restore what loss threatens to take away, but it can prepare someone to remain present without demanding an easy response.

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, brings a tape of her final show, and watches with her as if they were girls at a sleepover. When Kate asks Tully not to treat her as though she is dying, explaining that she needs Tully to be herself so she can remember who she is, their friendship makes room for both illness and ordinary intimacy. Margie’s welcome does not supply a simple cure for Tully’s childhood abandonment, nor does it make later family conflict disappear. Its lasting force is more concrete: Tully was given a home, a standard of honesty, and a way of staying beside the people she loves.