Mom and dad bickered for days when he bought the knives on QVC. It wasn’t so much that they were a needless purchase—although they were, since we already had a set of knives that served us just fine—but that dad had up and bought them without asking mom. He was between jobs at the time, and had been for several weeks. Mom was the sole bread winner, and she’d come home exhausted from extra shifts at the hospital. When he bought the knives, it was her money he had spent, and she let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d better damn well ask her the next time he decided to stick his fingers in her pockets. All the same, they were really good knives.