Dorothy Hart

Dorothy Hart, known as Cloud, is Tully Hart’s mother and the most intimate source of both her longing for love and her fear of being left. Cloud can greet her daughter with exuberant affection and speak of freedom as a gift, yet her intoxication and drug use make her an unreliable caregiver. Across Tully’s life, the relationship’s tenderness never cancels its instability; instead, it helps explain why friendship, chosen family, and the act of staying become so consequential.

Identity and Background

Cloud is introduced as Tully’s mother, a woman whose physical and emotional instability is visible even in a brief family confrontation. She tries to stand straight but wobbles, her eyes appearing strange as she twirls a strand of her long, wavy hair. When Gran suggests that she move in for a while and get to know Tully before taking on the responsibility of raising her, Cloud insists that she can determine what her daughter needs. Gran’s quiet conclusion that Cloud is drunk exposes the gap between her confidence and her ability to provide care.

Cloud’s intoxication is not abstract background. On Tully’s birthday, she returns after three years away and explains her presence by saying that love is the ultimate high. Tully responds by running to her room for a necklace she made at Bible school from macaroni and beads, a small handmade offering she has kept despite Gran’s warning not to raise her hopes. The necklace condenses the child’s investment in the reunion: Cloud’s return awakens a hope that has endured for years, even as the circumstances give Tully reason to doubt it.

Intoxication, Shame, and Abandonment

Cloud’s drug use is shown through the condition of the home and the difficulty of caring for herself. When Tully’s neighbor visits, Cloud is sprawled across the sofa with marijuana on her stomach, unable to sit up without failing and laughing. The room reeks of pot; a bong, a bag of Maui-wowie, an overturned wineglass, and empty pizza boxes make the disorder visible to an adult visitor. Cloud introduces herself warmly, but the scene leaves Tully exposed to what she has been trying to keep private.

That exposure turns into shame when Tully finds Cloud lying spread-eagled on the sofa, one leg on the coffee table and the other on the cushions, her mouth open and saliva at her lips. The girl next door has seen her mother like this. Tully imagines the school rumor that she has a pot-smoking mother and recognizes why she never invites anyone home: the secret, she feels, must be kept alone and in the dark. Cloud’s condition therefore shapes not only their household but Tully’s ability to bring friendship into it.

The same pattern recurs in a later encounter. Tully approaches Cloud with relief, only to find her mother laughing and nearly falling. Cloud calls Tully a beautiful spirit who needs only air and freedom. The words may sound affectionate, but the scene turns on Tully’s pleading response, “Not again,” and her appeal for help with her eyes. Cloud’s assurance, “Always,” carries an edge that conflicts with its promise. The contrast makes affection hard for Tully to trust: Cloud offers closeness in the moment, but cannot make that closeness feel secure.

Tully’s Vulnerability and Other Sources of Care

Cloud’s absence and instability form part of the emotional ground on which Tully encounters later pain. After Tully begins to cry in front of Kate Mularkey, Kate hugs her. Tully initially flinches at the unexpected contact, then clings to Kate, frightened that without her she will drift away and be lost. The scene gives bodily form to a need for steadiness that Cloud has not reliably met. Kate does not demand an explanation before offering comfort; her presence becomes a counterexample to Tully’s expectation that intimacy will vanish.

When Tully tells Kate that she has been raped, she describes the truth as a fire inside her that she must release or be consumed by. Her shame makes her wait for judgment, but Kate instead asks quietly whether she is okay. The account does not make Cloud responsible for the assault; it places Tully’s disclosure within a broader history in which she has had to manage frightening truths and the fear of being left alone with them. Kate’s listening offers support that is direct and immediate, while the mother-daughter bond remains unsettled.

Tully later tells Kate that Gran died while Cloud was gone. The news brings grief into the open: Tully breaks into gulping sobs, and Kate holds her without trying to fill the silence. Gran’s death is not a consequence of Cloud’s behavior, but the timing sharpens Tully’s sense of loss and the importance of someone who will stay beside her. In this pattern, care is measured less by grand promises than by the ability to remain present while another person is hurting.

The Pattern Reversed in Tully’s Care for Others

As an adult, Tully repeatedly occupies the position of caregiver, though her efforts can reproduce the very tension between protection and control that marks her own history. When Marah wants to enter a modeling school, Tully offers to accompany her and help her through it. Kate objects that Tully is not Marah’s mother and that keeping her daughter safe is her responsibility. Tully answers that safety is not everything and that some risks are necessary. The disagreement reveals Tully’s impulse to offer freedom and encouragement, values that echo Cloud’s language, while also showing that generosity can cross a boundary when it displaces a parent’s judgment.

That conflict becomes sharper when Tully intervenes in Kate and Marah’s relationship on live television. She tells Kate that both she and Marah need help, that she is scared for them, and that Johnny begged her to intervene while Marah was afraid to confront her mother. Tully frames the intervention as an act of concern, but its public setting leaves Kate feeling exposed and judged. Her history gives her a powerful sensitivity to abandonment and distress; it does not guarantee that her response will respect the privacy or authority of the person she wants to help.

A parallel ethical tension appears when Kate is critically ill. Tully tells Kate that an exclusive about Johnny’s condition could allow her to protect Kate, even as Kate insists that the news helped put her husband’s life at risk. Tully’s professional instincts and her loyalty to her friend collide. In a separate crisis, she steadies Kate when dizziness strikes, then insists on staying beside her in the ambulance, repeating that she is there. The acts of hands-on care are more immediate than any promise: Tully stays with Kate as she is taken to hospital.

What the Relationship Leaves Behind

When cancer has affected Kate’s brain, Johnny warns Tully that Kate’s faculties have been impacted and that she may not recognize her. The warning gives the fear of failed recognition a new, painful form, but Tully remains with her friend. On Kate’s last night in hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home, moves her bed until it nearly touches Kate’s, and plays a recording of her final show. Kate jokes about what a dying woman would want to watch. Tully laughs with her, and they watch the broadcast together like schoolgirls at a sleepover.

Kate asks Tully not to treat her as if she is dying, explaining that she needs Tully to be herself because it is the only way she remembers who she is. The request defines the closeness between them as a form of recognition as well as practical care: Tully’s familiar presence helps Kate remain connected to herself. When Tully has announced that she will leave her television show because real life is with friends and family and her family needs her, she turns that choice into presence beside Kate rather than another public declaration.

Cloud’s importance to the novel lies not in a repaired or neatly resolved mother-daughter bond, but in the pattern her care establishes: love can be real and still fail to provide safety. Tully’s later capacity to stay with Kate, to hold her through grief, and to answer vulnerability with companionship gains meaning against the instability of her childhood. Yet the echoes are not simple. Tully’s interventions can overstep, just as Cloud’s language of freedom cannot by itself meet a child’s need for dependable care. The relationship’s legacy is therefore both a wound and a measure: Tully knows the cost of absence, but must still learn that caring for someone means responding to that person’s needs and limits.