When Brandon was seven, his parents bought a plot of wooded land fifteen minutes from their small house with the intention of building on it. Two years of plans, dreams, contractor meetings, and permit filing later, they began to the process of removing trees and breaking ground. Brandon was fairly uninterested in the process itself, only impatient—as most kids would be—for the day they would actually see the dream realized and move in, affording him the space for his own bedroom for the first time in his life.

Brandon’s mom was a firm believer in greasing the wheels of the building process as much as necessary. She made weekly trips to the grocery store, loading the cart with cans of soda, flour, sugar and eggs. She kept the chest freezer in the garage filled with bags of ice. Each morning before dawn, she would get to work, and by the time Brandon would rise in time for prepare for school, the little house was filled with the pleasant aroma of fresh cookies or muffins. And every morning, instead of walking to the school at the end of the street, he would help his mom carry the container of warm baked goods and the family picnic cooler, freshly stocked with ice and beverages, to the car so that they could deliver their daily batch of goodwill and check up on the process with the builders.

Most of these morning meetings were brief and boring. Brandon would pick his way through the sawdust and around piles of debris, trying to make sense of the maze of studs as his mother glanced at her list of notes from his father and asked the workers about joists, window-placement, and pvc plumbing fittings. But sometimes Lawrence was on site. Lawrence was some kind of plumber, and even though Brandon didn’t think of his job as particularly fascinating compared to those of any of the others, Lawrence at least afforded him the time of day. With Lawrence, Brandon didn’t feel like just the kid of a customer who risked getting underfoot for the fifteen minutes he visited the site with his mom each morning. Lawrence was a kind, clean-shaven and unintimidating member of the crew who didn’t smell like cigarettes, always offered Brandon a smile, and asked him about school in a serious way that didn’t make him feel too sheepish to answer.

Brandon came to recognize Lawrence’s red van when he and his mom bounced slowly into the muddy driveway, and on the mornings it was there, he happily escorted her as she joined Lawrence in a walk around the site, looking at graveled trenches and tubes rising from the barren ground. Sometimes, Lawrence would smile at Brandon mid-conversation, squat down to his level, and gesture to what he and his mom had been talking about, explaining it so that he could understand its importance to the future house. Lawrence had become somewhat of a hero to Brandon. Each morning, Brandon added to his routine to count the root beers left in the cooler and replenish their supply if necessary, knowing that they were Lawrence’s favorite.

One Monday morning, and a day off for Brandon, he accompanied his mother to the house as usual. In recent weeks, the building site had suddenly made sense to Brandon as studded walls and OSB sheathing were clad in white plastic siding and the black yawning holes were replaced with windows. But today was well drilling day. That didn’t mean a lot to Brandon. Although he was nine, almost ten, his childish brain still half-expected a rock constructed cylinder with a roof and a crank to appear in the backyard, rather than the massive truck and noisy machinery that actually greeted them when they arrived.

Lawrence was there, and although he crossed the would-be yard to meet him and his mom, Brandon was somewhat reserved today. The hubbub, while awesome, made him nervous. As Lawrence spoke to his mother over the roar of the drill and pointed to unseen things, Brandon stared at the ground and kicked at one of the bricks of dried mud that had been left by the tread of an earth mover, like a trail of chocolate bars marching over the ground. Lawrence parted with his mom, who turned to Brandon and called over the din that she needed to call his father and that he should stay put. She produced an enormous cellular phone from her bag and started off for the other side of the house to place her call in the shadow of the noise.

Brandon watched as man on the truck operate levers, lowering spinning pipes into the ground. Gravel and muck swirled at their base. Lawrence had reached the pipe and studied the scene, calling to the other man in a loud communication that was completely obscured from Brandon by the mechanical clanks that reverberated around them off of the trees and half-built house. Lawrence was different today. He had not spoken but a brief greeting to Brandon. There was no smile, just business, and even though Brandon now stood alone in the center of the packed ground behind the house, an obvious and willing recipient of his attention, Lawrence was monopolized instead by the spinning pipes. As he stood and watched, he felt something akin to betrayal. After all of the moments they had shared together on various mornings over the past many weeks, he was now small and unimportant compared to the awesomeness of the monumental task before Lawrence today. The gravity that the situation took all of Lawrence’s focus chastened Brandon.

Brandon watched Lawrence curiously as he walked to the side of the drilling truck and grabbed a bundle from a side compartment. He stood transfixed as Lawrence slipped what looked like an old grocery bag over one of his work boots, crumpled handles flanking his calves. Then he scooped up a yellow rubber boot with a wide, floppy shaft and carefully guided his plastic-wrapped shoe into the boot. The once shapeless boot now stretched into shape, its yellow folds standing tall around his leg. A black adjuster strap swung from the side. Lawrence repeated the task on his other foot.

By the time Lawrence was ready to return to clatter of the loud spinning pipes, tapping a hard hat in place over the crown his head, he was no longer recognizable to Brandon. The visor of his white helmet obscured his kind, familiar face. The shafts of the yellow boots slapped around his knees when he walked, making his legs look twice their normal width. But strangest of all was the feeling Brandon had when he watched the new Lawrence step into the slurry issuing from the base of the pipe as it bore deeper into the ground. It was like a ache in the pit of his stomach, but it dropped lower than that.

Brandon struggled with the sensation, feeling there was some significance to the way he had just watched Lawrence transform. There was something moving about the actions he was witnessing, something magnetic about the undulation of his yellow boots, their black trimmed tops quivering about the knees of old Lawrence’s dark blue work pants. Brandon’s growing restlessness stirred further when the new Lawrence picked up a short shovel and began to clear away the mess from around the pipe. Wave after wave of gravely sludge lapped over the tops of his feet, the black soles and yellow uppers of his boots becoming one with the sodden ground.

Brandon expected new Lawrence to look down, to jump aside from the muck as he knew he would be expected to when faced with such deep filth. But new Lawrence seemed to allow it happen, shoveling away as though unconcerned that fresh layers of soupy mud climbed up the side of his yellow boots, painting them in a uniform band of sticky brown.

Brandon shied away from Lawrence after that day, even when the old familiar one returned smiling on subsequent mornings. He still stood with his mom in the half-finished house in his regular work boots, blue pants, and name-embroidered striped button down shirt like he always had. He once again asked Brandon about school. But Brandon couldn’t get the image of his hard hat and wobbly yellow overboots, mud swirling around their shafts, out of his head. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the unexpected transformation, nor the way Lawrence didn’t care that he had gotten covered in wet filth. And he couldn’t reconcile the strange sensation that still stirred with these thoughts.