I had come to dinner at my father’s — our monthly ritual — but after the smoked brisket he left. I did the dishes, then looked for him out back and found him dragging a piano into the backyard. He had it on two wooden planks that he rotated, moving one ahead and then sliding the piano forward until it reached the tip. He left a matted-down path in his wake.

Are you just going to watch me? he asked.

Up close I could see the piano was missing keys, chipped along the top, with gashes and dings and warped wood.

We stopped pushing in the middle of his backyard, slid the boards out, and let the dilapidated piano sink into the grass. In the evening light it looked like the skull of some unknown and forgotten beast, both repulsive in its grotesqueness and sad in its apparent emptiness of life.

Don’t you want me to help you bring it inside? I asked.

He sat down and began to play softly. I couldn’t guess the song, the piano was so out of tune.

When I was little, he said, my father used to take me to this department store called Montgomery Ward and we would never buy anything. Didn’t have the money. But back then they had a pianist who would tinkle away. I can remember the way my father would watch him. His whole face changed, gentle almost, and while he was listening something in him opened up that was closed the rest of the time. I thought I understood him then, if only while the music lasted.

He tapped out something high pitched and discordant.

Can you believe someone just left this out as trash? he asked. Who would throw something classy like this away?

He looked at me then but the sun had set and I couldn’t see the lines of his face, only the outline, and I wondered if in this light we might look the same.

I read a poem once about a piano in a field that was really a horse covered in a sheet, I said. I don’t what I hoped for in sharing this.

Do you want to play for a bit? he asked. I shook my head and he nodded like that’s what he was expecting. He played for a moment, the whole time looking at me, searching for something, but soon stopped and closed the keylid, apparently not finding it.

It wasn’t until I was driving home that I understood what he was searching for. I pulled off next to a dark wide field, this lonely place. I thought about missed opportunities. I tried to understand how someone could mistake a horse for a piano. How maybe it was both and neither. How things can be more than one thing at the same time. How difficult it can be to understand someone when they don’t understand themselves.

I scanned the wild grasses of the field, hoping, but it was quiet and nothing moved. I got in my car and drove back to his house, the whole time wondering, when the keys were in front of me, if I would remember how to play, or if it would be better to cover it in a sheet and pretend.

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Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in The Cincinnati Review, New World Writing, and X-RAY, among other journals. He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at www.evanjamessheldon.com.