It was the kitchen table where we used to argue, laughing, about paint colors neither of us really cared about.

It was the upstairs hallway where Declan had assembled the baby’s crib and sworn the instructions had been written by someone with a personal grudge against new fathers.

It was the wide front porch — the same porch — where he stood every morning with his coffee, reading the weather forecast aloud with the total, unshakable confidence of a man who was wrong about the weather roughly half the time.

That was the porch my father threw me down onto.