She wasn’t my real mother but that didn’t make it hurt any less watching the ending unfold before my eyes. My father was begging her not to leave. Not to leave us. Though I was standing right there in the hallway, I might as well have been invisible.

“Kevin, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t,” Frannie replied to his pleading.

“Frannie, what about Khalil? What about him? He needs you. You’re the only mother he’s ever known.” He tried everything else, now I was the pawn. True, I wanted her to stay but I had no idea how much weight I would carry with my father’s girlfriend.

Yet, now I was waiting for something. It was the first time my name had ever been brought up in an argument. What he’d said had been true. My mother had been a drug addict and neither of us had seen her in almost ten years. I was about to turn thirteen and Frannie had been around since I was six.

“I’ll always be there for Khalil, but I can’t do this anymore.”

Then my father said the unthinkable.

“The hell you will. If you leave here then you’ll never see him again.” Hearing this sent a slice of anguish through my insides. I didn’t know why he’d said something like that. “I mean it. You won’t be taking my son around any other men.”

Frannie paused and I could tell from her voice’s trailing off and quaking that she was near tears. “Kevin, that’s your decision and I’ll have to respect it.” Then she looked over at me standing there. She shook her head slowly in what appeared to be disgust before she said, “Khalil, I love you. I always will and I’ll try to see you as much as I can as long as your father…”

Cutting her off, my father stepped into our line of view. “Bitch, you don’t love him. If you did, you wouldn’t leave us.”

At the top of her voice she yelled as tears began to pour: “I’m not leaving him. I’m leaving you, Kevin. I’m leaving you.”

As cold as ice he walked past her and opened the door and replied, “It’s the same thing. Now go.”

She wiped her face and grabbed her bags and headed out the door. “I’ll call you to arrange to come and get my things.”

“Don’t bother. Anything you left will be in the Dumpster by the morning.”

She yelled something from the hall as my father slammed the door. He ran to the kitchen, found a bottle of liquor, and drank straight from it. Then he took a seat on the couch and called me to him. “Khalil, listen,” he said in his deep, raspy voice. “I’m sorry you had to see that, but that’s the way love goes. I did everything for Frannie and this is how she repaid me. She don’t care about me and she damned sure don’t care about you.”

I was dumbfounded as I stood there watching my father drinking white liquor as if it were water. “Dad, I can’t see her anymore?” I asked.

He was silent, sensing my pain. Then he nodded. “If she calls to see you, sure you can. But don’t hold your breath. She don’t care about nobody but herself and you’ll see how easy she forgets you. We’re better off, believe that. You’re my son, not hers and if you sit around waiting on her, you’ll see exactly what that means.”

I did. Over the next few months I learned how to make do without a woman in the house. I kept waiting on Frannie to come by or to call to at least let me know that she cared about me, but she did neither.

She let me down and slowly but surely I began to hate her just as much as my father did. Without her presence though I had no one to project the ill feelings on so I bottled it all up, until Tina came.