Mrs. Mularkey

Mrs. Mularkey, usually addressed as Mrs. M., is Kate’s mother and a steady presence in the Mularkey family. The novel reveals her character less through extended biography than through what she does when others are frightened, grieving, or physically failing: she offers an embrace, speaks plainly about what can no longer be changed, and makes room for laughter even in the shadow of death. Her care reaches beyond her own daughters, particularly to Tully, whom she had already welcomed into the family’s life.

Identity and Character

Mrs. Mularkey’s importance lies in the contrast between her unshowy manner and the weight of the moments in which she appears. She does not try to resolve grief with explanations or make suffering disappear. Instead, she recognizes when someone needs to be held, when difficult facts must be stated, and when a joke can briefly restore a sense of shared life. In Kate’s final illness she appears aged and physically frail, with snow-white hair, yet remains attentive to the needs of the people around her.

Her characterization also carries a comic, self-deprecating streak. She can deliver a mock warning about drugs and then reveal that the supposedly responsible parent knows more about her daughters’ teenage adventures than they assumed. The juxtaposition makes her neither a solemn emblem of motherhood nor merely a comic voice: she is a family member whose affection includes candor, irreverence, and an unexpectedly adventurous past.

Care for Tully

Mrs. Mularkey’s relationship with Tully is marked by care at moments when Tully has reason to feel exposed and alone. After Tully begins to cry, Kate approaches and embraces her; Tully initially flinches because the contact is unfamiliar, then clings to Kate. The scene establishes the importance of being received rather than judged. Later, Tully tells Kate that she has been raped. Mrs. Mularkey is not the listener in that disclosure, but it belongs to the history of vulnerability that makes the family’s acceptance of Tully significant.

When Tully tells Kate that her grandmother has died, Kate holds her as she breaks into sobs. These scenes place Mrs. Mularkey within a household that repeatedly makes space for Tully’s distress, even when another family member provides the immediate comfort. The novel’s pattern of care is collective: Kate’s closeness to Tully unfolds within the larger family world Mrs. Mularkey helps sustain.

Responding to Kate’s Illness

As Kate’s breast cancer advances, Mrs. Mularkey is present for the family’s effort to understand the illness and its limits. Kate’s diagnosis follows a long-standing discolored patch beneath her right nipple, which she recalls had first seemed like a bug bite and had been treated as an infection. When Dr. Silver notices the quarter-sized red area and puckered skin, she arranges an immediate ultrasound despite Kate’s report that her mammogram had been clear. The episode underscores the difference between a reassuring earlier test and the symptoms that still demand attention.

By the time Tully arrives during Kate’s final hospitalization, Mrs. Mularkey looks frail and has stopped dyeing her hair. She asks whether Kate called Tully; Tully replies that she came at once. Mrs. Mularkey then hugs her, and the remembered scent of Jean Nate perfume, menthol cigarettes, and hairspray makes this embrace specific and familiar rather than ceremonial. In a crisis dominated by clinical facts, the gesture restores the older intimacy between Tully and the family.

Mrs. Mularkey helps convey the gravity of Kate’s condition. Johnny explains that the cancer has metastasized and that Kate suffered a minor stroke; when surgeons operated, they found nothing they could do. Mrs. Mularkey adds that the cancer is in Kate’s brain. Johnny warns Tully that the disease has affected Kate’s faculties and that she may not recognize her. Mrs. Mularkey’s role is not to soften this prognosis but to stand with the family as it is spoken aloud.

She also articulates what care must mean when medicine has reached its limit. Tully proposes contacting an Ontario doctor whose work she had featured on a breast-cancer program, but Kate says she has had all the treatments and none has worked. She asks her friends simply to be with her. Outside the immediate bedside crisis, Mrs. Mularkey tells Tully that she has cried, argued, bargained with God, and begged doctors for hope; that struggle is now past. Her directness marks a change from fighting for another possible intervention to concentrating on Kate’s remaining time and the children who worry her most.

Mrs. Mularkey singles out Marah as especially troubled. The girl has shut down, she says, showing no tears or drama and listening only to music. Her observation gives Tully concrete insight into the family’s needs beyond the hospital room: Kate is concerned about her children, and Marah’s quiet withdrawal is itself a sign of distress. Mrs. Mularkey’s attention thus extends from the medical crisis to the relationships that illness threatens to leave unresolved.

Humor, Memory, and Family

The family’s humor offers a counterpoint to the seriousness of Kate’s decline. In a scene that evokes the girls’ youth, Mrs. Mularkey catches Kate and Tully smoking pot and teases them about supposedly worse drugs, including crack and LSD. Tully answers with a joke about saying no to crack, and Kate connects the exchange to the way she had tried to guide Marah’s clothing choices. Their banter lets the women move between generations without turning the moment into a lecture.

Mrs. Mularkey then takes the joint herself, draws deeply, and boasts that the girls from the seventies have nothing on her because she was around in the sixties. She explains that she had known about her daughters sneaking out at night to ride their bikes, despite the girls apparently assuming otherwise. Kate recalls that her mother had said it was alcohol that got her through those years. The discrepancy becomes part of the joke, while the revelation gives Mrs. Mularkey a past that exceeds the girls’ picture of her as simply the parent who sets rules.

That humor does not deny the physical cost of Kate’s illness. As the weeks pass, Kate loses words, struggles to finish sentences, develops trembling weakness in her fingers, and suffers nausea and persistent cold. By late July, her pain has driven her morphine dose to nearly twice its earlier level. Against this deterioration, the family’s laughter is not a cure or a reprieve from the facts; it is a way of remaining together as those facts become harder to bear.

Narrative Significance

Mrs. Mularkey represents care as a sequence of concrete responses rather than a promise that nothing bad will happen. The novel associates her with the family’s capacity to receive Tully, with the difficult conversations surrounding Kate’s terminal prognosis, and with the ordinary teasing that keeps the family recognizable to itself. Her embraces connect moments separated by years: she holds Tully in the present crisis with the same intimate familiarity that makes her part of the younger women’s shared history.

Her frank account of having exhausted hope also gives emotional force to Kate’s request for companionship rather than more treatment. Mrs. Mularkey does not offer a cure or a consoling theory. She identifies what remains possible: loving Kate, being there for her, and attending to the children she fears may be left alone in their grief. In this way, her practical tenderness helps define the novel’s account of family—not as protection from loss, but as the work of staying close through it.