MY FATHER’S ARCH-CONSERVATISM DEEPENED AS THE years wore on, even after his party climbed into bed with the fundamentalist “Holy Rollers” he had once openly disparaged. The platforms of the candidates he supported—including, of course, Jesse Helms—were growing more virulently antigay. He claimed—as my brother, Tony, would later claim—that his political beliefs were independent of his love for me. To me that meant that his love for me simply wasn’t important enough to make him challenge the relentless fag-bashing of his party. I should be grateful for his tolerance, he seemed to be saying, since I was the one who wasn’t playing by the rules. So I withdrew.

My brother, Tony, had begun to march in lockstep with my father’s politics when he reached middle age, much as I had done in my youth. It must have been a bonding experience for them—and a relief for the old man to have a son on his side again. According to Tony’s Facebook page, he embraced the Tea Party after Pap died, and once drove out to Oakwood Cemetery, where he listened to Rush Limbaugh with the car door open, so the old man could enjoy the broadcast from his grave.

In 2008, when Chris and I were married, Tony and his wife, Jean, flew to San Francisco for the wedding, where my little brother treated the other guests to the sort of almost-charming blunt talk for which the old man had been known. (“Y’all are mighty pretty for lesbians.”) But any hope that Tony had finally understood that love was love went south when he voted for Amendment 1, the measure that would alter the North Carolina constitution to ensure that marriage in that state would always be between one man and one woman. “It’s a matter of states’ rights,” he told me on the phone, using the argument my father had used to oppose integration. “What’s right for California might not be right for North Carolina.”

In 2014, when the University of North Carolina awarded me an honorary doctor of letters degree, I invited Tony to attend the hooding ceremony at the football stadium in Chapel Hill. He’s a big fan of Carolina sports, and I thought he might enjoy seeing me honored in such a setting, but he declined with a painfully inept excuse about a Mother’s Day luncheon. When, a year later, I finally confronted him about his absence, he apologized in an email: “I should have listened to my heart and not my head.” His head, I suppose, had told him it wouldn’t do to be seen celebrating the work of a liberal gay activist from California.

As of this writing, Tony is celebrating the ascendancy of Donald Trump and what I regard as a new fascist regime in Washington that has left our country more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

Brother against brother, then and now.

IN 2001, I published a novel called The Night Listener, which revolves around a San Francisco writer who drifts away from his aging conservative father because too much has been left unspoken over the years: a family suicide, the son’s resentment of the old man’s homophobia, et cetera. Four years later the book was made into a film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. We shot on location in New York City. It was there, as my snake-eating-its-tail life would have it, that I got word that my father was close to death. My sister was urging me to come home. Chris, my husband-to-be, thought we should go.

“What would be the point in that?” I asked him.

“He’s your father,” he said.

Great, I thought. The love of my life sounds just like my mother.

I nurtured no hopes of a deathbed epiphany with the old man. To me this was just one last chance to be hurt, probably with Fox News droning in the background. And my stepmother, who was roughly my age, always avoided intimacy with empty chatter about shopping and cocktails. For a while that had made her perfect for Pap. They didn’t have to talk about anything real.

We went to Raleigh, of course, in the end. Robin Williams, who was playing “me” in the film (and whose beard I was mimicking to make him look like he was playing me) approached us as we were leaving the set for the airport. “Give my love to Pap,” he said, looking directly into my eyes. As fellow San Franciscans, Robin and I had known each other for almost thirty years. He called me Armo sometimes, and had a habit of breaking into Tennessee Williams when he saw me. But he had never met my father beyond reading the novel and the screenplay. He had his own version of Pap, however, another gruff patriarch who was petrified of being close to his sensitive son, so I think he knew what I was about to face.

Chris, in fact, had never met my father either, since we’d only been together for a few years. When I consider that he might never have done so, I’m even more grateful that he had insisted on this last chapter.

In Raleigh, in that green-shuttered ranch house with the Howard Johnson’s cupola and the muddy creek still trickling down below, I introduced my husband-to-be to my father. When we moved about the house, Pap was wobbly on his feet, so we ended up settling in the Chimney Room, where, beneath his Confederate flag, he told tales of our selectively abridged family history. His illness had made him more docile than I had ever known him to be. He seemed swallowed up by his chair. There were ugly bruises on his arms from various falls. Skin cancer surgery, a legacy of his South Pacific days, had left a shiny pink patchwork on his nose. He looked small and frightened, not like himself at all. I hated this meek version of him. I wanted him to rise up and bark like an old elephant seal. Just once. So Chris could see it.

“Robin Williams said to give you his love,” I told my father.

He smiled. “How’s my favorite funnyman?”

That sounded wrong, so completely out of character. Pap had never used the word funnyman (who does, anyway, beyond the announcers on Entertainment Tonight?), and the old man, as I remembered, had been furious when Robin came out publicly against the war in Iraq.

He’s trying to be sweet, I realized. He’s scared and he needs company.

I could see why. There was an air of grim submission in the house, a mute anticipation of the end. When Chris suggested we go for a ride in the rental car, everyone liked the idea, including my stepmother, who told us, right there in front of Pap, that she’d be glad to have him out of the house for a while. She must have had her reasons—I’m sure she did—but I was suddenly so grateful that I had found someone like Chris, someone kind and self-aware who wouldn’t disconnect with me before the end has come. Someone who wouldn’t talk about me as if I were no longer in the room.

Chris drove. Pap was up front, riding shotgun, giving directions.

I loved sitting in the back, listening to their back-and-forth. It felt miraculous.

“Take a left up here, then swing around the bend and follow her straight up to Canterbury.”

“This neighborhood is nice,” said Chris. “So leafy.”

“Yes it is. You’re a damn good driver.”

“Thanks.”

“Much rather have you drive than that fella in the back.”

Chris chuckled.

“You know what I mean, doncha?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I can hear you two back here,” I said.

“Take a left on Canterbury,” said the old man.

We drove downtown, connecting the dots of my childhood, of Pap’s childhood, a jagged constellation of memories. We passed the historical marker honoring Grandpa Branch, who had died defending slavery and whose bed had been shipped to me in San Francisco as a gesture of my mother’s acceptance. (The general’s house was no longer there, even as a funeral home, having long since been replaced by a plain red-brick office building.) We rounded Capitol Square, past the Confederate monument and the steps where I’d spoken against Jesse Helms at Raleigh’s first Gay Pride March. On the other side of the square I pointed out Christ Church, with the incongruous rooster on its steeple, the inspiration for Dansapp’s “collection of cocks.”

Then we moved on to Oakwood Cemetery, where my mother had been buried for over a quarter of a century. I showed Chris her tombstone and its inscription—“All Things Bright and Beautiful”—chosen by my father because of Mummie’s favorite hymn, the one about “all creatures great and small.”

Then, still following my father’s directions, Chris drove us out to the far end of Clark Avenue, to the big old house where my father had grown up and my grandfather had killed himself. We didn’t talk about that; we didn’t need to. Under the comfortable cloak of fiction I had written of my grandfather’s suicide in The Night Listener, and Pap had loved the book, though he made a point of saying that “that business” hadn’t affected him as much as I’d imagined. When he had come to my appearance at a Raleigh bookstore he even became part of the show. During the Q & A portion, the inevitable question arose about where I get the inspiration to write, so I did what I always do and pantomimed a long, hard toke on a joint. It got the usual laugh, but Pap stole it from me by barking, “Shut the hell up!” from the audience. Suddenly we were a comedy act. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Have you met my father?”

After our tour, back at the house, when conversation began to flag, Pap said, “I reckon you’ve got a plane to catch.” It had been a perfect afternoon, a perfect summing-up in the presence of a sympathetic witness, and neither one of us wanted to screw it up. I hugged the old man goodbye—or as much of a hug as he would ever allow—and headed for the door. I thought that was the end of it until Pap pulled Chris aside and said something he thought I couldn’t hear:

“You take care of that boy, you hear?”

It was just an instruction, delivered almost brusquely, but in that moment of our last goodbye, it felt like a benediction.