She refused to look him in the eye, possibly still raw from their encounter two years prior when he refused to retrieve her girls’ shuttlecocks from his roof.

“Hello,” said the Korean woman. “My husband, he say you writer. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Raymond. He counted seven plastic barrettes in her hair.

“You write book. Yes?”

“Yes. I wrote a few books.”

“Can you help me?”

“What, dear, would you like me to do?”

She paused and organized her thoughts. Then, casting aside fears about her lack of grammar or diction, she shoved the bundle of papers into his hands.

“Please. This my husband book. He write this. Please read. Finish read, please, you tell me if good or if bad . . . okay?”

Raymond glanced at the papers, smiling wryly at the letterhead: All-Friends Worship. The word Viagra on one of the pages leapt out at him. Hah.

“When do you need these back, dear?”

She flinched, stunned that he’d taken so little convincing. A smile of relief burst across her lips: “When you finish.”

She nodded her thanks and backed off his porch, bowing painfully low.

“I see you later,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay.” He watched her scurry back toward her house, then remembered something. “Oh, wait, Mrs. Kim!”

She stopped and turned. “My name is Mrs. Park.”

“Mrs. Park . . . I’ve been meaning to ask you. You know that music that comes on at four o’clock every day? Does that”—he paused to find the least aggressive words—“bother you? It’s not from your house, is it?”

She seemed genuinely startled that someone would have thought that. “No, no!”

“I thought not,” he smiled, waving her goodbye. “I didn’t think it was . . . demographically probable.”

Mrs. Park pulled out bunches of chives and green onions she’d been saving all week. She dropped them into batter and fried savory Korean pancakes, their oily aroma filling the entire house. The girls circled her in the kitchen, miming gestures to each other, trying to decode her. She hadn’t said a word all evening, not since she returned from the creepy old neighbor’s house. Thirty pancakes, stacked high on a platter. Glaring at the girls, she turned off the stove and plucked off her apron.

“No touch!” she cautioned. “Pancake no for you!”

She ran into her bedroom and carefully put on a white cotton dress and white pumps. In the bathroom, she combed her hair, fiddled with a tortoiseshell barrette and applied red to her lips.

Mira blocked her in the hallway. “Ma, what’s going on? Are you trying to seduce that guy? Trust me, it’s not gonna work.”

Mrs. Park said nothing. She brushed past her daughter and dipped into the kitchen to collect the pancakes. Before exiting the front door, she looked right through Mira and called out to her firstborn.

“Rosemary, what’s meaning ‘democratically proper-ba’?”

“What’s what?”

“Democratically proper-ba.”

“I have no freakin’ idea.”

“Is good thing, no?”