Mrs. Park walked into the den and clicked off the TV.

“Ma!”

Then she walked over to the windows and shut them, muffling the rock music pounding from the Mystery Boom Box.

“Ma! What’re you doing? I finished my homework!”

Mrs. Park sat herself down on the sofa, and stared at her calloused hands.

“Baby, today I clean closet, I find something was your Dad’s.”

“Was it money? . . . A gun?”

“It is paper . . .” Mrs. Park looked up at Rosemary, smiling, but her eyes brimmed with tears. “He write many story! But was secret. He never tell me! I not know!”

“Really? Dad was a writer? Since when?”

“I not know.”

“Can I see them? Where are they?”

“They still in closet.”

“Well, did you read them? Are they any good?”

“I not know.”

“What do you mean? Didn’t you read them?”

“No. They in English.”

Mrs. Park placed the stack of stories on Rosemary’s desk. They were hand-written on letterhead from All-Friends Worship and numbered in total about sixty pages. She ordered a Domino’s pizza (Hawaiian, busting the week’s budget) and made hot cocoa in preparation for the girls’ reading.

There was a lightness in Mrs. Park’s step but the girls had a sick feeling about the stories when they spotted titles like “The Dancing Banana Woman” and “Child Toucher.”

“We make book to sell, yes?” Mrs. Park backed out of Rosemary’s room, nodding and bowing like an innkeeper in an old samurai flick. Once the door was closed, the girls looked at each other and made faces.

They divided the stories into roughly two equal piles and started reading, quickly trading the pages they’d finished. Their father’s handwriting was neat and square, and he rarely made any corrections.

The story “Cheater Man” began: The lawyer Harvey Finkelstein was down to his last pack of cigarettes when he remembered his dear old father. It had been over a year since he had paid the old boy a visit. Perhaps Father would be dying soon and he would will the entire lot of his remaining wealth to me, thought Harvey. As he approached his father’s mansion, he was surprised and delighted to see the undertaker’s van parked in front of the house . . .

The Harvey Finkelstein character was forever saying things like, “Another day, another dollar!” and always seemed to have a pastrami sandwich or bagel stuffed into his pocket. As the story went on, Harvey got mixed up with heroin smugglers who lived in peach-colored condos facing the water. Mr. Park’s gangster underworld sounded like something dreamed up by a child after Adderall and Vice City. At the end of ten pages, all the characters perished in a terrorist attack on Miami Beach.

“Wow,” said Rosemary, passing the pages to her sister. “You certainly can’t accuse him of being formulaic.”