Tony knelt on a foam pad. Around the rosemary, as everywhere in the back garden, between the narrow concrete patio against the house and the tall wood fences, bright green trifoliate leaves crowded the bed and trumpetlike yellow blooms unfurled in the winter morning’s thin sunlight. Taking care to get at least some of the pale belowground stem, he pulled up one small plant at a time and put it in the bucket for the compost bin.

He heard the back door, and then Lety at it: “Saint Francis of the Oxalis, kneeling for prayer.”

Still on his knees, Tony straightened up, looked back, and saw her pointing and grinning. 

“Bald spot’s not that big yet,” he said, circumscribing with index finger above his head the area of a monastic tonsure. “And I’m wholly unholy.”

“Alleluia,” Lety said.

“I could go with the brown robe and sandals, if they wouldn’t get me looks,” he said. At the door Lety still wore nightgown and bathrobe. His skin recalled the skin beneath them. “But not with the vow of chastity.”

Lety grinned again, then didn’t. “I just got off the phone with Carmen,” she said. “She needs a hand.”

“Not with the vow of poverty, neither,” said Tony. “How much?”

“Six fifty.”

“Does she not understand that we are retired?”

Lety said nothing.

“Does she not understand ‘fixed income’?”

Lety lowered her head.

“What is it now?”

“She’s a little short for rent,” said Lety.

“Rent is every month. How’s this month different?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Six fifty isn’t a little. What about next month? Where does it stop?”

Lety pulled her robe more tightly closed, crossed arms, and raised her head to look at Tony. “She’s my sister, Tone.”

The recollection of her skin was gone from his. As so often, he mourned that Jorge was gone and that Lety had turned so hard to her sister. He turned back and bowed to the oxalis. “Tell her she has to pay it back,” he said.

“Thanks, Tone,” he heard.

“Not that I believe she will this time, either,” he said, although he had already heard the door close.

♧

Carmen’s and Lety’s salt-and-pepper heads almost touched across the kitchen table. One’s liver-spotted hands and full lips matched the other’s both in form and rapid motion. Matched, too, were the curves of their slender backs away from their chairs and the outlines of their fine shoulders blurred beneath their sweaters.

“But Carlos….”

“I heard!”

“How could he?”

“How could she?”

Tony leaned back against the counter, mug of coffee in hand, and did not attempt to understand their exchange. At such moments, which were frequent, Lety seemed to him not so much his wife as part with her sister of some larger organism to which something that the priest had held in mental reservation while reciting the wedding vows had bound him. The Creature, Tony called it, if to himself only.

Then he recalled that the jar of coffee beans needed to be replenished and the refrigerator to be filled.

Looking around, he noted also that while the kitchen was spotless – he thought, Lety is a wonder – everything in it was at least twenty years old. The flecked pattern on the vinyl floor was long worn away before the stove, and the faces of stove, refrigerator, and cabinets were lightly scarred. Lety deserves better, he told himself. His old coworkers still at the Department of Building Inspection could recommend good contractors from the current crop, if he had money for the work.

“When will you get your life together?” he said.

Two faces turned to him with paired expressions of surprise.

“I mean, you’re working, right?” he said. “Money’s about the same every month, right? So how’s rent a problem one month, no problem another?”

Lety looked at the table now, Carmen still at him.

“You have your health. You have a rent-controlled place.” He had spooked the Creature. He would chase it off. It would return soon enough.  “Eating out? Boyfriend expenses?”

“Her fridge went out,” Lety said to the table. “She lost a week of food before the landlord replaced it. Then he wouldn’t give her a break on rent anyway.”

Carmen continued looking at him. “It’s nothing to you if I have male friends,” she said.

“Is if we’re paying,” Tony said.

She was up then, and Lety after her, and there came overlapping murmurs from the hallway downstairs and then a brief draft from the opening and closing of the front door.

A single set of footsteps came slowly up the stairs. They paused once.  Tony knew where: At the corner where he’d hung photos of Jorge, from dark-eyed infancy through his uniformed graduation from the police academy. Dread and anger mixed in Tony as he waited.

Then Lety was back in the kitchen. She didn’t look at him. “I have you.  You have me,” she said. “Who does she have in her life?”

“You,” said Tony, while knowing he did not want Lety to be quite so much in Carmen’s life. Even less did he want the Creature to grow to include others still, a man or men faceless to him, then maybe the man’s or men’s families, and beyond; who could say how far?

“Not the same,” said Lety.

He finished his coffee and went to the sink to wash the mug.

“Like it or not, she’s part of our lives,” Lety said to his back slowly, evenly. “What she needs, what she is: Part of our lives.”

Tony understood he was not to reply.

♧

Tony and Lety held hands on their after-dinner walk among the neighborhood’s close-packed two- and three-story houses. All along the channels the houses formed he recognized by streetlight the massed trifoliates, the yellow blooms furled now to little cylinders in the long wait for day. From crevices at the base of fence planks, from sidewalk openings around the trunks of the evergreen Chinese elms or the bare-branched plums, from below the hardiest pelargonium blossoms in pots on stairs, from gaps in the asphalt beside sewer grates: Oxalis.

Few hours had passed since Carmen had blown in a squall from kitchen table through front door, but Tony’s fingers interlaced with Lety’s exactly as they had for more than fifty years, since before they married. It had not been their first argument of brief vehemence. He knew that it would not be their last, and he knew her, and that this would not be enough to prevent an evening walk or unlace their fingers.

He knew well what had been enough. They still visited weekly the little cross they had placed on the Olympic Club side of the road that divided it from Lake Merced. It was the only place beyond his garden where Tony pulled oxalis and planted other flowers. Tony and Lety had assigned no blame to anyone for the wreck, least of all to each other. Lety had even remarked that she was grateful that Jorge had been alone and no one else hurt when on his way home from the police practice range just up the road he had met the downpour and missed the curve.

At Lety’s insistence his funeral Mass had been at the Church of the Epiphany, where Jorge had also been baptized, given First Communion, and confirmed. The front pews around Tony, Lety, and Carmen had been filled with men and women in dark blue, the City’s emblem of the phoenix on their upper sleeves, caps on their laps. Pallbearers in blue had escorted the casket through the church doors and loaded it in into the hearse, and police motorcycles had cut a path through traffic for the hearse to Colma.

From the day after returning from Colma, Lety had left in the morning for her job at Laguna Honda Hospital, she had returned in the evening, she had moved about the house, she had walked beside Tony as he pushed a shopping cart, she had curled tight in bed, expressionless and as silent as necessity permitted, and she had declined what had been his customary invitations to their evening walks, until he stopped offering them. Tony had wondered if it might have been easier for her if their only child had died as policemen sometimes did, at someone’s hand. Lety would then have had someone to hate, and hatred might have provided some sense and a source of solidarity.

Tony, too, had been overrun with memories and crushed under the seeming futility of Jorge’s boyhood and young manhood, but the wreck, while as senseless to him as to Lety, had not at all shocked him. As a building inspector he had been sent often into the Marina District just after the Loma Prieta earthquake. At moments it had seemed to him that hardly a right angle or straight line remained there, that geometry itself had been subject to forces beyond it and henceforth could be trusted only so far. Days of ducking or at times crawling through the tilting and twisting houses and apartment buildings of the Marina, of seeing where lives had been contorted and some lost, had left him feeling that the earthquake had torn open before him a crevice with no discernable bottom, in which all was possible, for good or ill.

Jorge had wrecked in this crevice.

Tony could not recall exactly how long it had been after the funeral – more than a year, less than two – when Lety had turned to him as they washed and dried the dinner dishes and pans together and said, “Can we walk?”

On the sidewalk outside he had opened his hand and felt with pleasure and gratitude her fingers find their places again among his.

At that same time her calls to her sister had grown longer and their visits more frequent, and the Creature had been born.

Now Tony gestured with his free hand at a bank of oxalis below a house stepping just up on the hill from the street.

“I wouldn’t want to weed all this, too,” Tony said.

“Who’s asking you to?” said Lety.

♧

Tony could not figure out how Lety accomplished it, conversing through a cell phone held between shoulder and jaw, so that both hands were left free. Whenever he had tried, his face in contact with the screen had ended the call.

On this occasion, while she spoke with Carmen, Lety’s hands rinsed black beans that had soaked overnight.

“That was sweet of him…. Well, maybe the daughter will come around when she sees you’re making her papa happy…. Calistoga’s quieter in the winter, but you’ll still have fun.” She laughed, and the laugh bounced her shoulders, but the phone remained in place. “Maybe more if rain keeps you in.”

Tony imagined Carmen at the signal’s other end in her studio apartment partitioned out from a grand Victorian house over the hill in the Mission District. He imagined her, too, rinsing beans, her phone held between shoulder and ear and peeking out from gray and black locks. The Creature spanned miles.

He imagined also oxalis fringing in green and yellow the top of the low streetside retaining wall, cast in concrete to resemble stone, at the base of the Victorian’s iron fence.

♧

Tony knelt again before the oxalis. Its second wave had come, the plants fewer but more robust than in the first. He felt relief in knowing this garden and the little patch by Lake Merced were all he had to tend. He pulled his bucket close.

All across this City of Saint Francis, in sandy soil or clay, or from cracks in graywhacke, serpentinite, chert, pavement, sand- or mudstone, the little diurnal trumpets blared a bright yellow.

In contemplating their expanse and the endless and even expanding task of uprooting them Tony glimpsed the possibility of a species of – not surrender, really; he would pull those at hand until he no longer could – but of abandon.

He recalled tales that had at once lured and frightened him in childhood: An abandon, as of one who sheds velvets and puts on coarse brown wool and rope belt, who then walks out from the Umbrian town and its stone walls redolent of good food, wine, and perfumed bodies, and into the wind and rain of the forest.

An abandon, as of one who begs stones from quarrymen and masons and carries them one by one through the countryside to rebuild one chapel after another.

An abandon, as of one who searches out the man-eating wolf in its nightbound thornkept lair, opens arms to it, and says: Brother.

He found suddenly that he had remained motionless a good while, kneeling upright, as recollections of the tales of the saint – as perhaps something more – clenched him. Before him remained thick clumps of oxalis. There was – he thought with some amusement – a wolf in the oxalis, in its task to which he could open his arms in abandon.

Then, the amusement vanishing: From what else did the yellow eyes of wolves watch him?

He bent to his task.

♧

EVERYTHING MUST GO; CLOSEOUT: Lety and Tony strolled the Stonestown Macy’s aisles, he just back of her left shoulder and admiring her. The crinkles where neck met shoulder, just showing through the salt-and-pepper waves, a spot his teeth still marked sometimes….

She asked a clerk to let her try on garnet earrings, pushed back her hair to hold them up to one ear, then the other before a mirror, returned them.

…the dance of vein and tendon across the backs of her hands….

They continued on among the jewelry cases: EVERYTHING MUST GO.

…the quiver of each hip at the outermost point of each sway: He wanted and loved all this, and her, and all that was hers….

He stopped walking. “Even that,” he muttered, as fear quickened his breath.

She glanced over her shoulder. “What did you say?”

He shook his head.

She stopped by gold chains.

…even the Creature.

Tony walked past her a few steps.

He understood now, he could not love Lety without loving the Creature.

And in Lety’s love for their son and her sister that had spawned the Creature, and in his love of a Creature that spanned miles, that might in fact span all the hills of the City and the hills beyond, folds of them forever, a Creature with appetite for the little that was his, he now saw abandon. He felt himself again at crevice’s rim, before him all possible good and ill. He was far from childhood. He would not allow himself a child’s fear.

Under glass before him a single ovate pearl dangled from a fine gold strand.

“Lety,” he said, turning toward her and pointing at it, “this one might be nice on Carmen, for her dates.”

She looked at him with brown eyes wide.

He smiled and opened his arms to her, as to the wolf.