Cloud

Cloud, Tully Hart’s mother, is a largely absent and drug-addicted parent whose sporadic returns never erase the damage of leaving. Her relationship with Tully shapes the daughter’s fear of abandonment, her hunger for maternal recognition, and, years later, a difficult reconsideration of what their history means. Cloud is not made reliable by that reconsideration: the same daughter who wonders whether she overlooked her mother’s returns still finds Cloud asking for money and offering little acknowledgment in return.

Identity and Background

Cloud is seen through the consequences of her instability. When Tully visits her at a campground in Yelm, Cloud is not yet forty, but drugs have left her looking much older. She stands smoking near a row of portable toilets, in a coarse gray Cowichan sweater and pajama-like pants, her cheeks hollowed and lined. Her eyes have the glassy, unfocused look Tully recognizes in an addict. The description makes visible the distance between the mother Tully hopes to find and the person who is actually there.

Cloud’s life is also marked by repeated moves and unsuccessful treatment. Tully has not seen or spoken to her since Gran’s funeral, but, as executor of Gran’s estate, has continued sending Cloud a monthly payment. Cloud’s changing addresses arrive in postcards that ask for money rather than express thanks. She has entered rehabilitation many times, but Tully later observes that she has never done so with support. The pattern supplies both an explanation for Tully’s continuing involvement and evidence of its limits: money keeps reaching Cloud, while closeness and dependable care do not.

Tully’s Childhood and the Cost of Absence

Cloud’s absences form the emotional background to Tully’s need for a family. When Tully is overwhelmed and starts crying, Kate’s unexpected hug initially makes her flinch; touch is unfamiliar enough that she tries to pull away. Then she clings to Kate, afraid that without her friend she will drift away and be lost. The scene does not assign that fear to Cloud alone, but it gives it a shape consistent with the insecurity Cloud’s repeated departures have fostered: comfort feels both desperately needed and unfamiliar.

The wound becomes explicit when Tully confides in Kate that Pat Richmond raped her. She braces for judgment and cannot bear to look at Kate, but Kate quietly asks whether she is okay. In another scene, Tully names the sources of her anger as Cloud, Gran, and God, then tells Kate that Gran has died. Kate holds her as she breaks down. These moments place Cloud within Tully’s experience of abandonment and loss, while also showing the contrast between a mother who has not reliably been there and a friend who responds to pain by staying close.

The Mularkey household gives that contrast a further dimension. Mrs. Mularkey 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. Tully lives with the evidence of a child’s hope for Cloud’s recovery even in a home where another adult offers care. Cloud’s illness and addiction therefore reach beyond her own life: they become the subject of Kate’s concern and a reminder that Tully’s private family history is being held, in part, by the family that has taken her in.

The Campground Visit

Years later, Tully goes to Cloud’s latest address in Yelm while on assignment for KCPO News. The trip is also Tully’s first on-air report. She tells Cloud about the television appearance with pride she tries to conceal, but cannot help revealing. Behind that professional achievement is the child who once filled twelve memory books, hoping that someday her mother would know her and be proud of her. The visit therefore carries two kinds of expectation at once: Tully wants Cloud to see the journalist she has become, and still wants the recognition she once sought as a daughter.

Cloud does not meet that bid with pride. She responds to the television news with a dismissive remark about it being an opiate of the masses. When she says she is short of money, Tully gives her the fifty-dollar bill she has kept for emergencies. Her practical help is accompanied by a pointed joke about not giving all the money to one dealer. Cloud clumsily takes the cash, leaving Tully with a familiar exchange: she has provided something her mother needs, but has not received the acknowledgment she came hoping for.

Tully leaves wishing she had not come. Knowing what to expect does not protect her from wanting something different. She tells Cloud she will send money for her next rehabilitation, framing another attempt at treatment as a family tradition, and walks back to the van. When Mutt asks whether her mother is proud of her, Tully grins and claims that Cloud cried like a baby. The bright answer covers, rather than resolves, the disappointment of the visit. Cloud’s failure to recognize her daughter’s achievement again leaves Tully to manage the emotional cost herself.

Reconsidering the Past

A later encounter with Chad Wiley prompts Tully to think again about Cloud. She remembers his reassurance that she is not alone and that everyone has a family. Though she knows she cannot recall his precise words, their meaning stays with her. The thought grows into a question about how she has understood her mother: Tully has focused on the times Cloud left, and wonders whether her determination to hate and forget the disappointments made her overlook the times Cloud came back.

This reconsideration is not a declaration that Cloud’s departures did not matter. Tully recognizes that hope can be dangerous when the negative evidence is so substantial; what changes is her willingness to look at the whole pattern rather than file away every return. The possibility that Cloud’s reappearances had meaning will not stay hidden from her. Instead of continuing to run from it, Tully takes two weeks off work and flies west, carrying the question into a new search for her mother.

When Tully explains her decision to Kate and Johnny Ryan, she clarifies that the journey is not simply about Chad. She wants to find Cloud at the last address she has, help her enter treatment, and see whether support might give them a chance. Kate points out that Cloud has been in treatment many times. Tully does not deny the history; she believes that the missing element may have been support. Her hope is concrete and relational, but it remains a hope rather than proof that Cloud is ready to recover or that their relationship can be repaired.

Relationship and Narrative Significance

Cloud’s relationship with Tully is defined by an imbalance that persists across time: Tully sends money, pursues recognition, and eventually offers to accompany her mother toward treatment, while Cloud’s visible responses offer little dependable care in return. Yet Tully’s mature search complicates a simple account of abandonment. She begins to wonder whether Cloud’s returns, amid her departures, were part of a history she had been too hurt to interpret generously. The narrative preserves both truths—the harm of absence and the emotional force of a return—without making either cancel the other.

Cloud’s importance is also felt in what other people do for Tully. Kate embraces her when she cries, sits with her through grief, and becomes the friend Tully fears losing. Mrs. Mularkey’s household makes room for her, while Kate’s prayers extend concern to the absent mother herself. In adulthood, Tully’s desire to support Cloud through treatment becomes an effort to make care travel in the other direction: the daughter seeks to be present for the parent who was not reliably present for her. That reversal carries risk, because love and practical assistance cannot guarantee recovery or reciprocity.

The novel repeatedly sets Tully’s longing for family against the family she has built through friendship. Cloud’s absence helps explain why Kate’s steady presence can feel like an anchor, and why the possibility of losing Kate is so frightening. Later, when Kate is seriously ill, Tully leaves her television work and stays at the hospital, bringing a recording of her final show to watch with her friend. Kate asks Tully not to treat her as if she is dying, but to be herself, because that helps Kate remember who she is. Cloud’s story and Tully’s friendship with Kate are not interchangeable; rather, the contrast shows how the meaning of family in Tully’s life is shaped both by a mother’s uncertain returns and by the friend who repeatedly stays.