Lucy's mother continually occupies Lucy's thoughts, exciting fury, scorn, desire, and guilt. Lucy relates a huge sum of her experiences to some memory or opinion about her mother, which proves the power of the mother-daughter bond. The very departure that Lucy hopes to make with her journey to America, however, causes her sorrow, for she believes she'll never again know the kind of love she shared with her mother. Though Lucy determines that she must break with her mother to achieve adulthood, she aches powerful feelings of loss in the process.