“Tell your father to get Alan out of the tub.” I’ve just started another letter to Robin when Mom knocks on my door. This isn’t the first time I’ve been assigned interparental messenger duty, but this summer it’s been a nearly permanent position.

Alan used to hate baths. As a kid he could go months without one and never smell too bad, except for his feet, which Mom would periodically scrub while he stood ankle-deep in the tub.

But about a year ago, around the time he turned fourteen, body odor discovered him. Now about once a week Mom bribes him with Three Musketeers bars. The funny thing is, once you get him into the bathtub, he always wants to stay. Getting him out has become the paterfamilias’s job.

I climb the attic stairs. On a rainy evening like this, I’m surprised to find Musclini shirtless, his skin glimmering with sweat. Free weights and barbells are scattered about the rubber mat on the attic floor, but right now he is straining against an immobile bar in the wooden isometric rack. At five foot ten, he’s more lean than brawny. He does lots of reps for strength and endurance, thus his muscles aren’t he-man bulky. Better for tennis, he says.

When I was around nine or ten, I got into my first real fight and came home with a split lip and a large reddish bruise on my left temple. (The only punch I remember landing got the other kid in the ear.) Dad told me that growing up he’d been a skinny, frail kid and was beaten up regularly. It got so bad that his mother begged the school to let Dad out five minutes early each day so he’d have a head start before the bullies came after him. I was shocked to hear that. In our house, he’s always been the ultimate physical enforcer. It was hard to imagine that he might have once been on the receiving end.

After the fight, I asked the paterfamilias to get me a chin-up bar because Cousin Barry had one and he was strong. Dad was thrilled. He was always trying to get me to exercise. Always encouraging me to lift weights, to do “isometric” exercises on this thing that looks like a wooden torture rack. He never came right out and said that it worried him that I was soft and weak as a kid. But so much of what he did implied it.

Now, in the attic, Musclini stops straining against the torture rack. I relay Mom’s message about getting Alan out of the tub and head back downstairs to my room.