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must be signed by a witness.”
    I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn’t.
    â€œA witness?”
    â€œYes. It should also be typed, and then signed in blue ink. My father’s a lawyer, so I know about these things.”
    I still couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding. Usually I can read people—but Gunnar, being Swedish and all, is as hard to figure out as IKEA assembly instructions; even if I think I’m reading him right, it’s guaranteed I’ve done something wrong and I’ll have to start over.
    Since his expression stayed serious, I thought of something to say that sounded seriously legal. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
    He grinned and slapped me hard on the back. “Excellent. So let’s have dinner and watch The Grapes of Wrath .”
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Five places were set for dinner—including one for Mr. Ümlaut, who was presumably working late, but would be home “eventually.” Mrs. Ümlaut made hamburgers, although I was expecting something more Scandinavian. I knew about Scandinavian food on account of this Norwegian smorgasbord place my family once accidentally ate at, because it was called DØNNY’S and my parents thought the ø was an e . Anyway, there was a lot of food at the buffet, including like fourteen thousand kinds of herring—which I wouldn’t touch, but it was satisfying to know there were so many different things I could refuse to eat. I was oddly disappointed that not a single form of herring was on the Ümlauts’ menu.
    Sitting at the Ümlauts’ dinner table that night was not the nerve-racking ordeal I had thought it would be. No one talked about Gunnar’s illness, and I didn’t say anything too terribly stupid. I talked about the proper placing of silverware, and the cultural reasons for it—something my father made sure to teach me, since I had to put out place settings at the restaurant. It made me look sophisticated, and balanced out anything subhuman I might have done at the table. I even demonstrated my water-pouring skill, pouring from high above the table, and not spilling a drop. It made Kjersten laugh—and I was pretty certain she was laughing with me instead of at me—although by the time I got home, I wasn’t so sure.
    Mr. Ümlaut didn’t make it in time for dinner. Considering how much my own father worked lately, I didn’t think much of it.
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Dad came home early from work that night with a massive headache. Nine-thirty—that’s early by restaurant standards. He sat at the dining table with a laptop, crunching numbers, all of which were coming up red.
    â€œYou could change your preferences in the program,” I suggested. “You could make all those negative numbers from the restaurant come up green, or at least blue.”
    He chuckled at that. “You think we could program my laptop to charm the bank so we don’t have to pay our mortgage?”
    â€œYou’d need a sexier laptop,” I told him.
    â€œStory of my life,” he answered.
    I thought about talking to him about Gunnar, but his worries tonight outweighed mine. “Don’t work too hard,” I told him—which is what he always said to me. Of course he usually said it when I was lying on the sofa like a slowly rotting vegetable.
    Before I went to bed that night, I took a moment to think about the various weirdnesses that had gone on in Gunnar’s backyard that afternoon—particularly the way he acted when I gave him that silly piece of paper. I had written it just to give him a laugh, and maybe get him to shift gears away from dying and stuff. Had he actually taken me seriously?
    I opened a blank document on my computer, and typed out a single sentence. Then I pulled up the thesaurus, changed a few key words, found a really official-looking font, put the whole thing in a hairline box, and printed it out:
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I,