Tully Hart and Margie Mularkey’s surrogate mother-daughter bond

Tully Hart and Margie Mularkey’s surrogate mother-daughter bond gives Tully a measure of the dependable care missing from her own relationship with her mother. Margie’s care is expressed less through declarations than through ordinary, repeated acts: making room for Tully in the family, letting her cry, and reassuring her that she is not alone. The relationship becomes especially consequential when Tully’s trauma, bereavement, and loyalty to Kate Mularkey collide with her sense that the Mularkeys are the closest thing she has to home.

A Place in the Mularkey Household

On holidays, Tully takes her usual place cross-legged on the floor at Margie’s feet, while Kate sits on the arm of the cherry-red sofa and Margie occupies Bud’s La-Z-Boy. The arrangement captures Tully’s attachment in a domestic image: she gravitates toward the woman she regards as the perfect mother, not merely toward the household’s hospitality. Tully’s position in the room is habitual, and the family gathering gives her a place within a pattern that existed before her.

Margie also makes the care behind that belonging explicit. When she tells Tully that Kate has been praying for her mother to recover from cancer and has even set up a small altar in her room, she is speaking as a mother who has noticed her daughter’s compassion—and as someone willing to let Tully see that compassion. Her assurance that Kate is a good girl recognizes the closeness between the girls while showing Tully that her place in the family is not incidental to Margie’s attention.

Comfort Without Demands

The bond is forged through moments in which Tully cannot maintain her guarded composure. After a painful experience, Tully stiffens as Kate approaches, then starts to cry. Kate hugs her; the contact initially feels foreign, but Tully finds herself clinging to the girl, afraid that without her she will drift away and be lost. That first embrace belongs to Kate, but it opens onto the wider security Tully seeks in the Mularkey home: affection that does not require her to pretend she is fine.

Later, Tully tells Kate that she was raped. She takes a deep breath, describes the truth as something burning inside her, and finally says what happened. Kate asks quietly if she is okay. The scene establishes how the friendship and Margie’s household care meet Tully’s need to be received after violence: disclosure does not make her shame disappear, but she is no longer bearing the secret alone.

Margie’s own care is especially clear when Tully learns that her grandmother, Gran, died while Kate was away. Tully admits she is angry with Cloud, Gran, and God. When Kate holds her as she breaks into sobs, Margie’s wider role in Tully’s emotional life is sharpened by contrast: the security Tully finds in the Mularkey family has become a refuge against successive losses in her own family. The narrative presents this refuge through presence and consolation, rather than suggesting that Margie can undo what Tully has lost.

Care in Crisis

After Tully is shot during a robbery report, Kate visits her in the hospital, and the two trade familiar teasing. Tully asks whether she was good; the exchange restores a trace of their ordinary intimacy amid the seriousness of her injuries. When Margie later lets Tully cry and dries her tears with a Kleenex, she does not turn the moment into a lecture. She tells Tully that her fear was natural and reassures her that the family is there and she is not alone. Tully cries until the pressure in her chest eases, then tries to smile and says she is ready for her lecture.

Margie’s response also allows Tully to speak about her relationship with Chad Wiley, her former professor. She asks whether Tully loves him, a direct question that brings the adult relationship into the same room as the familiar maternal scrutiny. Tully acknowledges that he is her ex-professor and explains why she had kept the relationship from Margie, anticipating that Margie would consider him too old for her. The exchange shows that their closeness includes both comfort and the possibility of judgment: Tully can expect Margie to ask difficult questions, even when she has withheld information from her.

A separate crisis reverses their positions. When Kate is swaying and Tully sees that something is wrong, Tully gets up quickly, knocks over her margarita, and steadies her with an arm. She tells Kate she is right there and guides her toward a phone. After Kate loses her pregnancy, Tully remains beside her in the ambulance, repeating that reassurance as Kate is taken into the hospital. Margie sits with Kate in a small green hospital room overlooking the parking lot, reading a paperback while her daughter sleeps. Tully brings Margie coffee nearly two hours after the loss; Johnny is still away on assignment in Spokane. In this scene, Margie and Tully share the work of staying near Kate, each offering a different form of care.

Belonging, Separation, and Limits

The pregnancy loss exposes Tully’s fear that the family bond may not survive changes in Kate’s life. In the hallway, after Kate is with Johnny, Tully says she feels she should be beside her friend. Margie watches her closely and assures her that Kate will always need her. But she also says that Kate is married and that the two women are on separate paths, even as they remain best friends. The phrase unsettles Tully because it names a change she has not fully reckoned with: marriage and separate adult lives alter the household’s old arrangement, though they do not erase the affection within it.

That tension returns when Tully offers to help Marah pursue a modeling school and says she will go with her. Kate objects that Tully is not Marah’s mother; she sees the offer as interference in her effort to keep her daughter safe. Tully argues that safety cannot be everything and that sometimes a person must take a risk. The conflict exposes a limit to the surrogate bond: intimacy with the family does not make Tully a parent, and good intentions cannot settle disagreements about who has the authority to decide what Marah needs.

Margie’s care nevertheless remains part of the support system surrounding Tully as Kate becomes gravely ill. Before Tully visits Kate, Johnny warns that cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that she may not recognize her. On Kate’s last night in the hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home, takes his place in the other bed, and pushes the beds until hers is almost against Kate’s. She brings a tape of her final show, and the two watch it together. Kate asks Tully not to treat her as if she is dying, saying that she needs Tully to be herself because it is the only way she remembers who she is. Margie is not the focus of this bedside scene, but the family’s long-standing care for Tully helps make possible the closeness she offers Kate at the end.

Significance of the Bond

Margie’s role in Tully’s life is defined by an accumulation of practical, emotionally responsive gestures: she notices Tully’s attachment to the household, makes room for her grief, and tells her plainly that she is not alone. The bond does not replace Tully’s mother or eliminate her vulnerability to abandonment. Instead, it gives her a contrasting experience of maternal care—one that is present in a holiday seat near Margie, a hand offered during tears, or a place in the hospital room when a friend is suffering.

The relationship also complicates the idea of chosen family. Tully belongs deeply to the Mularkeys, but Kate’s marriage, motherhood, and illness change the conditions of that belonging. Margie recognizes that the girls have separate paths without treating their friendship as disposable; Tully, by contrast, sometimes experiences those changes as the threat of being left outside. Their bond therefore carries both its comfort and its limit: Margie can reassure Tully and receive her into the family, while Tully must still learn that closeness does not mean she can occupy the role of mother, prevent loss, or keep every beloved person beside her.