Welcome to our family, Tully

“Welcome to our family, Tully” is Mrs. Mularkey’s promise that Tully can belong to the Mularkey household, not simply receive temporary shelter. Spoken when Tully fears being sent back into an unwanted life, the phrase becomes a durable point of origin in her memory: she recalls the family’s acceptance as the beginning of something new in herself and remembers her senior year with Kate as the single best year of her life.

The offer of a home

Tully has been weighing the prospect of another family placement with little confidence that anyone can make her life secure. When Mrs. Mularkey tells her that Kate wants her to live with them, Tully answers, “Yeah, right.” The dismissive reply protects her from hoping too quickly; the possibility sounds too generous to trust. Mrs. Mularkey does not present the offer as an escape from every boundary. She explains that a girl living in their house would have chores, would have to follow rules, and would not be allowed to smoke. The ordinary terms make the invitation concrete: Tully is being offered a place in a household, with responsibilities and limits, rather than a moment of pity.

Tully asks directly whether she can live with them, unable at first to put the sudden hope into words. Mrs. Mularkey leans forward and touches her jaw, acknowledging how hard Tully’s life has been and saying she cannot bear to send her back to it. The gesture and the explanation answer the fear beneath Tully’s skepticism. The decision is not framed as a reward for perfect behavior; it is a response to what she has endured and to the danger of returning her to an unstable situation.

When Mrs. Mularkey finally says, “Welcome to our family, Tully,” she pulls Tully into her arms and lets her cry. Tully gives up the crumpled, half-empty pack of cigarettes she has carried in her purse. That small relinquishment accompanies the much larger change in her circumstances: she can live with the Mularkeys. Relief releases grief as well as joy, and she cries for Gran, the foster family, and Cloud. The welcome does not erase those losses; it gives her a place where she can feel them while someone holds her.

The meaning Tully carries forward

The phrase acquires its deepest significance through Tully’s later recollection. Across the decades of her life, she remembers the moment as the beginning of something new, a turning point in the person she becomes. In the loud, loving Mularkey household, she discovers that she can stop keeping secrets, telling lies, and pretending to be someone else. The family never treats her as unwanted or not good enough. Their acceptance therefore changes not only where she lives but what belonging allows her to be.

Tully’s memory gives the words an enduring home beyond the original scene. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, and whomever she is with, she returns in memory to Mrs. Mularkey’s welcome and the senior year she spends inseparable from Kate and included in the family. She identifies that year as the best of her life. The phrase stands for a chosen family’s sustained acceptance, not merely the instant when a door opens: its force comes from the everyday life that follows, in which Tully is neither a guest to be tolerated nor a burden to be sent away.

A recurring language of care

The welcome resonates with the way care and belonging recur in Tully and Kate’s friendship. When Tully begins to cry after Kate draws close, Kate embraces her; Tully first flinches, then clings to her, frightened that without Kate she will float away and be lost. Later, after Tully tells Kate that she was raped, Kate’s quiet question about whether she is okay offers a space for disclosure rather than blame. These moments are not the same as the Mularkeys’ invitation to live with them, but together they show why being received without rejection carries such weight for Tully.

That pattern returns in adulthood as practical care. When Kate becomes suddenly ill, Tully steadies her, insists on riding in the ambulance, and repeats that she is there. During Kate’s final hospital stay, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home, moves her bed beside Kate’s, and brings a recording of her last broadcast so the friends can watch it together. Kate asks her not to treat her as if she is dying, but to be herself, because that is how Kate remembers who she is. The old welcome and these later gestures belong to a continuing language of presence: care means making room for the other person, staying close, and responding to what that person needs.

Belonging’s limits and its legacy

The phrase does not mean that Tully’s later choices always agree with Kate’s or that love removes conflict. When Tully offers to help Marah enter a modeling school, 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 sometimes a risk is necessary. The disagreement exposes the limit of surrogate belonging: Tully can be part of the family without replacing Kate as Marah’s mother, and her affection can coexist with choices Kate considers intrusive.

The difference between welcome and overreach sharpens the phrase’s meaning. Mrs. Mularkey’s offer responds to Tully’s urgent need for a home, and its lasting value lies in the safety and acceptance that follow. In other circumstances, Tully’s attempt to help can cross a boundary or expose someone she loves to harm. Her later relationship with Kate therefore cannot be reduced to the original rescue; it develops through acts of support, disagreement, rupture, and renewed presence. Still, Tully’s memory of being welcomed remains a measure of what belonging can make possible: a life in which she need not perform worthiness before she is allowed to stay.