Gee (Nancy O’Brien), the Maternal Grandmother of Mickey and Kacey Fitzpatrick

Quick Facts

Role: Maternal grandmother and reluctant guardian to Michaela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick and Kacey Fitzpatrick after Lisa O’Brien’s death
Also known as: “Gee”; birth name Nancy O’Brien
First appearance: Early childhood flashbacks that frame the sisters’ upbringing; reappears in the present timeline as a constant, abrasive presence
Defining context: Grief, poverty, and a survival-first ethos that often reads as cruelty
Key ties: Daughter Lisa O’Brien (deceased), her granddaughters, and the absent father she resents

Who They Are

Boldly unsentimental and flinty, Gee is the family’s hard edge: a woman forged by loss and scarcity who confuses protection with punishment. She keeps the girls clothed and fed by working multiple jobs, but withholds warmth, convinced that tenderness invites disaster. Gee’s secrecy—especially about child-support money and hidden letters—turns her home into a fortress of control. Through her, the story explores Family Bonds and Dysfunction: how love, when filtered through fear and rage, can warp into something that looks indistinguishable from harm.

Her body mirrors this history—“a thin woman, full of nervous energy,” her “long ruddy face” moving in unsettling ways—shrinking in old age without losing the sharpness of her judgments. She is the kind of caregiver who keeps the heat low and the rules high, teaching survival even as she starves her granddaughters of gentleness.

Personality & Traits

Gee’s personality is defined by a punitive pragmatism. She believes the world is merciless and assumes it’s her job to make the girls tough enough to withstand it. That conviction breeds judgment, secrecy, and a secondhand anger she never metabolized after Lisa’s death—anger that lands most brutally on Kacey.

Harsh, pragmatic, unsentimental: When the girls complain about the cold, Gee snaps, “Are youse gonna pay the bill?” Comfort is expendable; survival never is. Her parenting is logistics without softness.
Resentful: She reminds the girls they were an unexpected burden—“I thought I was done with all this”—and funnels particular blame toward their father, Daniel Fitzpatrick, whom she holds responsible for Lisa’s addiction and death.
Secretive and mistrustful: “Reluctant to involve outsiders,” she hoards control by hiding child-support checks and letters throughout the girls’ childhood—an act of control that epitomizes Secrets and Betrayal.
Judgmental and class-policing: Mickey’s intellect is “uppity,” Kacey’s missteps are moral failure, and Gee’s refrain warns against “the same old shit” choices their mother made. Ambition is suspect; deviation is punished.
Buried capacity for affection: Mickey remembers a softer Gee in Lisa’s presence, and later Gee dotes on her great-grandson, calling him “my baby.” The tenderness exists—but it bypasses the girls who needed it most.

Character Journey

Gee does not transform so much as she is slowly decoded. In childhood scenes, she stabilizes the household materially while impoverishing it emotionally; her cold house and closed-off heart shape two very different sisters. As Mickey grows into a self-reliant adult, she realizes that toughness was both a gift and a wound: “I was soft… and you made me hard.” The plot’s unsealing of Gee’s secrets—hidden letters and cashed child-support checks—forces a reckoning. Gee refuses contrition, insisting that presence, not money, raises children. Her final revelation—that Lisa used drugs while pregnant with Kacey but not Mickey—reframes (but does not excuse) her lifelong condemnation of Kacey. By the end, Gee stands not redeemed but recast: a tragic custodian of generational pain who confuses vigilance with virtue and leaves love unused on the table.

Key Relationships

Mickey Fitzpatrick: To Gee, Mickey is “the responsible one”—useful, reliable, and “too serious for her own good.” Their bond is functional but emotionally arid; Gee offers little support to Mickey as a mother, sustaining a learned distance that Mickey must unlearn to parent differently.
Kacey Fitzpatrick: Gee sees Kacey as Lisa’s repeat performance and treats her accordingly—without mercy. After Kacey’s first overdose, Gee drags her home from the hospital only to shut her out, a punitive pattern later explained (but not justified) by Gee’s belief that Kacey was marked in utero by Lisa’s drug use.
Lisa O’Brien (Daughter): Lisa is Gee’s great love and abiding wound. Flashbacks show Gee softer and prouder around her, but Lisa’s death calcifies Gee’s grief into rage—rage she displaces onto Kacey and Lisa’s partner rather than confronting its source.
Thomas Fitzpatrick (Great-Grandson): With Thomas, Gee finally dispenses warmth—candy, endearments, boastful pride. Her ease with him underscores the central paradox of her character: she can love lavishly, but chose not to when Mickey and Kacey were the ones in need.

Defining Moments

Even when she resists change, key scenes expose what drives Gee and what she passes down.

The college forms: When Mickey seeks help with financial aid, Gee sneers at her ambitions—“They’ll take your money and spit you out on the sidewalk.” Why it matters: Gee polices class boundaries, turning protection into discouragement and teaching Mickey that aspiration invites humiliation.
Kacey’s first overdose: After Kacey is revived, Gee declares, “I went through this once with your mother. I’ll never go through it again.” Why it matters: Her zero-tolerance stance on Addiction and Its Consequences collapses empathy into refusal, equating love with containment and repeating the past she claims to resist.
The final confrontation: Mickey discovers hidden letters and cashed support checks; Gee answers with justification, then reveals Lisa’s drug use during pregnancy with Kacey. Why it matters: The scene reinterprets decades of cruelty as grief fused with fatalism—explaining without absolving and crystallizing Gee’s belief that hardness is love.

Essential Quotes

“A little old lady, said my grandmother, Gee. Too serious for her own good.”

Gee’s label for Mickey is both dismissal and diagnosis: she sees seriousness as a flaw, yet it’s precisely the armor her household required. The line captures her tendency to belittle what she unwittingly cultivated.

“She was always reluctant to involve outsiders: afraid, I believe, that they would take a hard look at her parenting and deem it unfit in some way.”

Control masquerades as prudence here. Gee fears institutional judgment, so she hoards authority—and, in the process, isolates the girls from resources that might have helped them.

“I thought I was done with all this, she said to us often, mostly when Kacey had gotten into some nonsense or other.”

This refrain casts the girls as an interruption to Gee’s late-life reprieve. It weaponizes sacrifice, turning caretaking into a ledger and love into debt the children can never repay.

“He left you. I was the one who raised you. I was the one who took over when everyone else left you girls behind. A couple hundred bucks a month doesn’t change that.”

Gee equates physical presence with moral authority, justifying her secrecy about money and letters. The rhetoric of abandonment lets her erase the children’s right to information, keeping power—and narrative—under her roof.

“I was soft, I say, and you made me hard. Gee nods. That’s good, she says. The world is a hard place. I knew that was something I had to teach you, too.”

This is Gee’s credo: hardness as inheritance. It exposes the double edge of her parenting—she engineers resilience, but at the cost of tenderness, passing down the very austerity the next generation must learn to survive and transcend.

Gee