Angel & Mae

Angel and Mae’s relationship is a formative bond of tenderness shadowed by abandonment and bereavement. Mae loved and cared for her daughter, but Angel absorbed her father’s rejection and her mother’s sorrow as proof that she herself had ruined Mae’s life; after Mae’s death, that childhood self-blame became one of the foundations of Angel’s emotional numbness and distrust of love.

Identity and Early Bond

Mae is Angel’s mother, and Angel’s earliest memories hold both physical affection and a child’s effort to comfort her. Mae brushed her hair and spoke gently, but when Mae was distressed, young Sarah felt that the heaviness inside her was her own fault. She wondered whether Alex Stafford would return and decided she would no longer call him Papa because she had heard him hurt Mae and leave her sad.

That conviction had a source in what Angel later remembered of her parents’ conflict. Alex Stafford said he already had children with his wife and had not wanted another; he told Mae that Sarah should never have been born. Angel understood his rejection as an indictment of her existence, not merely a rejection of Mae. She later recalled hearing her father say she was supposed to have been aborted, while acknowledging that she never knew whether his accusation that Mae had wanted a hold over him was true.

Care, Poverty, and Loss

Despite their hardship, Mae tried to give Sarah a life marked by care and ritual. During their years on the docks, when food and money were scarce, Mae still made Christmas a holy day and barred men from their shack. She also brushed Sarah’s hair and offered reassurance that things would be different for her. Those memories endure alongside the painful scenes of Mae’s despondency, making the relationship more than a story of deprivation: it is also the record of a mother trying to protect and comfort her child within narrow circumstances.

When Sarah was eight, Mae became ill and refused a doctor, saying she needed rest. As her breathing grew more labored, she asked Rab to take care of her little girl. Mae died the next morning, in the first sunlight of spring, with her rosary beads in her hands. Sarah initially could not cry; she lay beside her mother’s cold body and begged her to wake, then wept that she wanted to go with her. The loss ended the daily bond, but it did not loosen Sarah’s attachment to Mae.

The Inheritance of Self-Blame

After Mae’s death, Rab said that Mae was free and no longer unhappy. Sarah heard this as freedom from herself: she imagined that if she had not been born, Mae would be alive and happy in a cottage surrounded by flowers. The thought turns grief into self-condemnation. It also carries forward the earlier belief that her father left because of her and that her mother’s suffering was therefore her responsibility.

As an adult, Angel can recount that Mae became a prostitute after the family ended up on the docks, while Rab drank away the money. She remembers Mae dying when she was eight, smiling, and describes the family’s history as evidence that she should never have been born. The narration thus links Angel’s later defenses to a childhood in which parental rejection, poverty, and bereavement were folded into a single explanation: that she was a terrible mistake.

Resemblance and Repetition

Angel recognizes Mae in her own reflection. Asked what she sees in the mirror, she answers, "My mother." The resemblance is emotional as well as familial: she remembers Mae’s devotion to Alex Stafford, whose departure remained an open wound. Angel recalls Mae crying and asking why Alex had left, and she believes her mother never recovered from what she had given up for love.

This inheritance becomes a warning Angel turns against her own attachment to Michael Hosea. She wonders whether Mae’s hunger to keep Alex’s love alive—whether her whole life revolving around his visits and her happiness depending on him—helped drive him away. When Angel’s feelings for Michael grow, she fears that she is repeating Mae’s dependence and that love will bring the same pain. The parallel is not simply a repetition: Angel’s memories of Mae’s care, Christmas observances, and rosary persist alongside her bitterness, leaving her caught between the love she received and the fear that love makes a woman vulnerable to abandonment.