Gran

Gran, Tully Hart’s grandmother, is a largely offstage but consequential figure: she leaves Tully both an inheritance and the memory of a dependable family bond. After Gran dies, Tully becomes responsible for sending money to her estranged mother, Cloud, yet the practical support Gran’s estate enables cannot replace the person Tully has lost. Her death returns repeatedly in Tully’s grief and in the story’s contrast between financial provision and the harder-to-replace comfort of being held by someone who cares.

Identity and Significance

The available scenes identify Gran through her relationship to Tully and through the estate she leaves behind. At eighteen, Tully becomes executor of that estate and responsible for monthly payments to Cloud. The inheritance is not merely a memory: it helps explain why Tully can decline paid office work and remain an intern. Gran’s legacy therefore gives Tully some economic latitude even as her death removes a source of personal security.

Inheritance and Its Limits

The estate connects Gran to Tully’s difficult relationship with Cloud. Years after the funeral, Tully follows a path through a campground in Yelm to find her mother, who has sent a succession of postcards asking that money be mailed to new addresses. Tully has never received a thank-you for the monthly disbursements. When Cloud takes a fifty-dollar bill, Tully says she will send money for her next rehabilitation; the exchange makes the continuing cost of Gran’s legacy visible. Tully can provide money, but she cannot make Cloud into a reliable source of care.

Gran’s inheritance also affects Tully’s working life. When an office opening becomes available, a colleague explains that Tully wants to stay an intern and does not need the pay because of her grandmother. The detail distinguishes Tully’s choice from a lack of ambition: her position allows her to pursue the newsroom opportunity without taking the administrative job. Gran’s estate continues to shape Tully’s options after Gran herself is gone.

Death and Grief

Tully tells Kate that Gran died while Kate was away. The revelation comes amid Tully’s anger at Cloud, Gran, and God, but Kate’s quiet sympathy opens a space for grief. Tully breaks into sobs, and Kate holds her without demanding an explanation. The scene gives Gran’s death an immediate relational consequence: Tully’s loss is met not by a solution but by the presence of her closest friend.

The comfort matters because Tully has already experienced betrayal and violence. After she tells Kate that she was raped, she is overwhelmed by shame and waits for judgment; Kate instead asks whether she is okay. In another scene, Tully begins crying when Kate approaches, flinches at the unexpected embrace, then clings to her, afraid of being left adrift. These moments do not make Kate a replacement for Gran, but they show how the friendship becomes a place where Tully can receive tenderness after losses that include Gran’s death.

A Legacy of Care

Gran’s influence persists through both concrete provision and emotional absence. Her estate supports Tully’s independence and funds the money sent to Cloud, but it also marks the boundary between what material resources can and cannot repair. When Tully names Gran among the people and powers she is angry with, grief is not presented as simple gratitude for an inheritance; it remains painful and unresolved.

The later scenes extend this pattern of care across Tully’s life. Tully steadies Kate when Kate becomes dizzy, insists on staying beside her in the ambulance, and eventually takes the bed next to Kate’s in the hospital. She brings a recording of her final show, and Kate asks her not to treat her as if she is dying, but to remain herself so Kate can remember who she is. Gran’s story is not given an on-page ending of its own in these scenes. Instead, her death helps establish the history of loss against which Tully’s acts of companionship—and the care she once received from Kate—gain their meaning.