Wüsthof Silverpoint II 10-Piece Set
by Brenna Womer
I pulled a knife from the block, my favorite chopping knife with its blunt tip, round and snub-nosed, though, I’m not sure anyone else could pick it out by that description, but I always know it when I see it because it’s my favorite, with its smooth, black handle and the sharpener, too, in its little hole, and I can hear his voice in my ear like a father, like a bladesmith, saying, Keep them sharp or else they’re useless, and showing me the way to hold the sharpener vertically in one hand, its tip pointing up at the pockmarked ceiling of the house we found on Craigslist, with the tip pointing up he held the knife in the other hand, perpendicular to the sharpener, resting the blade against it at the hilt and pulling it toward him then thrusting it forward, over and over again he did this, and the metals together made a whoosh, made a shingg, the metal shining, catching the yellow kitchen light like a ring would have, like the ring the knives were supposed to be, on my finger, the left hand, the hand I’d use to hold the sharpener, the hand where nothing sparkled even after the words two years, big gift, something special; the knives are in a different home now, my home with someone who isn’t him, and when I packed my things I wondered if they were mine to take because it never really felt they were for me in the first place, after all, did I even care enough to sharpen them, Come here and let me show you, When’s the last time you sharpened these, Too long, too long, Look how it won’t even cut through the skin of this lime, Too long, Watch how I sharpen it, Now it goes right through, see, and so we made drinks and we talked, and I miss those talks where I could say something exactly, or close, and he would understand the thing exactly, or if he didn’t, would talk through and around and over and over again until he did, and by the end I knew I understood it better too, and we would make love against the kitchen counter, on the chaise lounge, on the hood of the car in the open-air garage because the neighbors were old and already asleep; the man made hunting knives out of his shed, sharpened them on a big wheel in the big shed behind his garden, his garden which was so much better than our garden and that summer while I was watering our cherry tomatoes he handed me a basket of cucumbers and I didn’t know they would be prickly, that they didn’t want to be held by me or the old man or his wife who was in and out of the hospital and never heard us on the hood of the car because she went to bed around eight and her husband shortly after, but he knew how to sharpen a knife and grow a garden and keep a wife for fifty-plus years, and I should’ve asked him how to sharpen a knife because sometimes it’s hard to learn from the people we love, and how to grow a garden because the squirrels kept eating my peppers, squirrels with pepper breath, and how to keep a wife for fifty-plus years because maybe then I could’ve told him how to keep me, and he never would’ve said, So you really don’t think you’ll regret this, and I never would have looked back at him sitting on our green, tweed couch, If you walk out that door it’s over, and me with one foot out the door saying, I know, and then closing the door and driving past the cheese factory that pumped cheddar into the air and the grocery store where we bought things to chop, things that dulled the knives, and then driving back three days later while he was at work and packing everything, including the two-year knife set, into a trailer attached to a truck that drove me away from the tweed couch and the spent garden and the love that taught me how to sharpen things.
