1970

In the 1970 storyline, ten-year-old Tully Hart experiences a brief reunion with her mother that ends in abandonment. Set against the upheaval of the year, the episode moves from the rigid quiet of her grandparents’ home to the uncertainty of a street where Tully is left alone; its ruptured chronology reflects how the child can recall the abandonment only in fragments. The year also frames the beginnings of the friendship with Kate Mularkey that will become a source of care through later trauma and loss.

A Quiet Household

While much of the country is changing, Tully’s home on Magnolia Drive is orderly and quiet. She builds a Lincoln Log cabin for her Liddle Kiddles on the cold wooden floor. The domestic world is spare: her grandmother dislikes music, television, and board games, and spends her time making Bible samplers, which she donates to the church for Christmas fundraisers. Tully’s grandfather, weakened by a stroke, stays in bed; the tinkling of his bell is what sends her grandmother hurrying down the hall.

The stillness has its own pattern of care, but Tully’s deepest sense of safety rests on her grandmother. When her mother returns, Tully is therefore pulled between the familiar protection of the home and the hope that her mother’s presence might last.

The Reunion and Its Promise

Tully’s mother arrives intoxicated, and Tully responds to the announcement of her birthday with immediate urgency. She rushes to her room and searches through her vanity drawer, scattering her belongings as she looks for the macaroni-and-bead necklace she made her mother at Bible school the year before. Her grandmother had warned her not to expect too much; Tully’s hopes, however, have been raised for years.

Her mother insists that she is not drunk and presents being reunited with her child as a powerful high. The moment gives Tully a chance to offer the necklace and to believe in the reunion. But when her mother says she is taking Tully with her, the promise of closeness becomes a sudden separation from the person who has actually kept her safe.

Abandonment and Fragmented Memory

Tully’s grandmother clutches her shoulders and reminds her that she knows the family’s phone number and address, urging her to call if she becomes frightened or something goes wrong. Seeing her normally strong, quiet grandmother cry confuses Tully; she wonders what is happening and whether she has already done something wrong. Her mother leaves, and the story gives no intervening account of what Tully does next: the child later remembers only that her mother never came back.

For years, Tully cannot reconstruct the events after the departure. The people around her blur into a cloud, and her memory resolves into a single stark image: waking on a dirty cement stoop beside an empty street, with a policeman on horseback looking down at her. The gap is significant to the novel’s treatment of 1970: abandonment is not presented as a complete, orderly recollection but as an experience whose decisive fact survives while much of its surrounding time does not.

Friendship as Care

The consequences of abandonment recur in Tully’s later relationships. When she begins to cry in front of Kate, the unexpectedness of being held is physical as well as emotional: she flinches, tries to pull away, then finds herself clinging to her friend, afraid that without Kate she will drift away and be lost. The scene echoes the childhood need for someone who will stay, while distinguishing the support Kate offers from the uncertainty attached to Tully’s mother.

Tully later tells Kate that Pat Richmond raped her. Shame makes it difficult to turn and meet Kate’s gaze, and she expects judgment; instead, Kate quietly asks whether she is okay. Years afterward, when Tully tells Kate that her grandmother died, Kate holds her while she sobs. Across these distinct moments, the friendship does not erase the original abandonment or the violence Tully has experienced. It gives her a reliable witness and a place to receive comfort.

The Year’s Lasting Frame

The 1970 strand establishes a pattern that returns at later points in Tully’s life: a threatened or broken bond can make closeness feel frightening, while another person’s practical presence can offer a measure of safety. That pattern also reaches beyond childhood. When Kate is critically ill, Tully insists on staying beside her in the ambulance, repeating that she is there; later, after Kate’s brain cancer has affected her faculties, Tully remains with her in the hospital and brings a recording of her final broadcast. The images of a child left alone and an adult refusing to leave her friend are not equivalent events, but their contrast gives the novel’s treatment of care across time its force.