I Said Yes

A younger man would have called inward for instructions. I am not a younger man. I said yes, and I put the kettle on, because whatever was on that ship had been gone sixty-one years and would want something hot, and that is the kind of certainty you can still have at my age even when you have no others. The Anchorite docked clean. Better than clean. It docked like a ship flown by someone who had done it ten thousand times. The lock cycled. And out of it came one person, only one, a woman who looked perhaps thirty years old, in a survey uniform of a cut I remembered from old photographs, and she stood in my little room and looked at me and at the kettle and at the unchanging view, and her eyes filled up. I have been so cold, she said. May I sit down. I gave her the second chair. I have only the two.