“Wait till you read this one,” Mira said. “It’s almost avant-garde.” She handed over the story “Child Toucher.”

Rosemary’s eyes widened. She read, “‘In fact, he scoffed at people who were occasionally hauled into court for acts of peepism . . .’ Peepism?” She cast the story aside and squealed. And Mira squealed, too, for good measure.

The girls could have stopped here but there was something morbidly enticing about reading such bizarrely bad writing—by somebody so close to them, and so dead.

“The Dancing Banana Woman” the girls saved for last because of its title. It had to be savored. They read this one out loud together: Venus Washington loves to dance cha-cha. Never mind that she is not terribly good at it and woe betide the man or woman who is silly enough to tell her the truth. She is cushioned by false praise from her dancehall partners, and the adoration of her husband Leroy, who brings a new dimension to the word “wimp” . . .

The girls groaned, but read on all the same. There were questionable spots of fluidity: The wrinkles on her thighs which used to dissipate after an afternoon at the spa now seemed reluctant to desert her and Leroy moved at a pace thought not possible for someone as corpulent as he. They pointed out sentences like these to each other with mounting suspicion that he might have plagiarized them. Rosemary, in particular, found it hard to picture her white-haired father sitting at his desk, writing the final line of the story: As he lived, so he died, in the most fitting manner and in the most appropriate place—in a brothel.

“This feels like the first one he wrote,” said Rosemary. “It’s got a beginning, middle and end. Like, structure. Before he felt confident enough to break free and, like”—her fingers crooked into scare quotes—“experiment.”

“Isn’t it weird that Dad wrote all this stuff and yet he wouldn’t let us read Harry Potter because it’s got wizards?”

“He was always a hypocrite.”

As they gathered up the pages, they wondered why the story was called “The Dancing Banana Woman.” Bananas did not figure in the least, except perhaps as a crude sexual metaphor. Then Rosemary’s cheeks burned with mortal embarrassment. It hit her—Venus Washington was African American.

“We have to burn these,” she whispered. “We can’t ever let anyone see them.”

They stared at the papers on Rosemary’s pink coverlet, chilled with the awareness that these were their father’s most personal items of legacy.

“If this was how he saw the world, no wonder he was so unhappy,” Rosemary said.

“Hot damn!” Mira exclaimed.

“Hot damn,” Rosemary echoed.

Rosemary watched her mother sink deeper into the sofa.

“I’m sorry, Ma. But they’re, like, slightly disappointing.”