Mae’s return to her parents’ home ends in rejection, not reconciliation: her father declares her dead to him, and she leaves with Sarah. The family rupture forces the two into a precarious life sustained by selling treasured possessions and moving from lodging to lodging, while giving Sarah an early lesson in abandonment that reverberates through her later relationships.

The return and rejection

At the door, Mae’s mother recognizes her and is overcome with tears. Mae pleads to come home, but her mother warns that the situation is not simple. She lets Mae and Sarah inside and asks them to wait while she speaks with Mae’s father. As Mae paces and silently prays, her mother returns with a white, tear-streaked face and says no.

Mae insists on confronting him, offering to beg and admit that he was right. Her mother tries to stop her, explaining that he considers his daughter dead. Mae answers that she is not dead and hurries after her mother, leaving Sarah behind in the room. When she returns, her face is pale and her manner dull; she tells Sarah they are leaving. Her mother presses money into her hand, the only help she can offer. Mae gives a broken laugh, takes Sarah’s hand, and walks away in tears.

Poverty and displacement

The money and possessions provide only temporary shelter. Mae sells her ruby ring and pearls, and she and Sarah stay at an inn until the proceeds run out. She then sells her music box, allowing them to live more comfortably for a time in an inexpensive boardinghouse. Later, she asks Sarah to return the crystal swan; the money from its sale supports them for a longer stretch in a rundown hotel.

Eventually Mae finds a more lasting place for them in a shack near New York’s docks. Sarah sees the sea there for the first time. Though garbage floats in it, she likes the water, the salt air, the ships arriving with cargo, and the sound of waves against the wharf’s pillars. The scene sets Sarah’s attraction to the harbor beside the poverty that has carried them there: even a compromised refuge can offer something she values.

Consequences for Sarah

The rejection is more than a lost home. Sarah witnesses her mother’s appeal, the blunt refusal, and the departure that follows; in the aftermath, security depends on exhausting a small store of money and selling objects one by one. The move to New York therefore begins a pattern in which survival is uncertain and belonging can be withdrawn by those with power over it.

Later, as an adult known as Angel, Sarah approaches forgiveness through work and self-punishment. Remembering that Mae was never forgiven despite saying countless Hail Marys and Our Fathers, she cannot understand how a single word could absolve her. She responds by seeking more chores and treating labor as penance, even as that effort creates distance rather than closeness. The childhood scene of her mother pleading for acceptance thus becomes part of the emotional history behind Angel’s difficulty receiving grace.