The whispering always stopped when Sam came into the room. Mom and Grandpa would be leaning together over the kitchen table, heads close, voices low as bees — and then a chair would scrape and someone would say, brightly, "Biscuit?" It had been going on for four days. Sam had begun to walk more quietly on the hall floorboards, hoping to catch one word, just one, that would let him in on it.
In Grandma's sitting room, on the shelf above the fruit bowl, sat the brass ear-trumpet. It was older than Grandma, curved like the throat of a lily, wide at one end and small enough at the other to fit against your ear. Grandma had taught Sam the listening game with it years ago: find ten sounds, then nine, and so on, and you'd be asleep before you got to one. There was only one rule about the trumpet. Ask first.
That evening, with the window open to the dusky garden and Mom and Grandpa murmuring faintly next door, Sam did not ask. He lifted the trumpet down, slid behind the armchair, and pressed the wide bell to the wall.
The voices came through soft and swimmy. "...before Saturday..." said Mom. "...don't let on..." said Grandpa. Then the kitchen door opened, and Sam jumped so hard that the trumpet swung out of his hands and knocked the iron radiator with a flat, ugly bonk. When he turned it over, there was a dent in the brass the size of a thumbprint, a little bruise in all that shine. Sam put it back on the shelf with the dent facing the wall.
Supper was sausages, which he usually loved. Sam cut them into smaller and smaller pieces and didn't eat much of anything. When Grandma laughed at something Grandpa said, he looked at the tablecloth. When Mom asked if he was tired, his voice came out very small and said yes.
After dinner, Grandma settled into her chair with her ankles crossed and the lamp on. Sam stood in the doorway with his hands squeezed into fists at his sides. "I took the trumpet without asking," he said, all in one breath. "I was listening through the wall. And I dented it."
Grandma didn't say anything for a moment, and that moment was the hardest part of the whole day. Then she held out her hand for the trumpet, turned it to the light, and touched the dent with one finger. "The brass I can see to," she said. "It's the creeping about I mind. Why the wall, love?"
"Because you all stop talking when I come in," said Sam, and his eyes went hot. "Everyone's got a secret except me."
Grandma sighed and laughed at the same time. "Oh, you silly thing. The secret is you. Saturday. I was giving it to you — this. Grandpa's been making a box for it, lined with green felt."
Sam sat down on the rug rather suddenly.
"Right," said Grandma. "You dented it, so you'll mend it. Fetch the wooden spoon." She showed him how to rest the brass over a rolled tea towel and tap, tap, tap from the inside, gentle as anything. It took a long while. The dent came up slowly, until it was only a faint ripple you could feel but hardly see. "There," said Grandma. "It'll always show a little. Most mended things do."
Then the rain began — that soft, whispery start that means it intends to stay. Grandma pulled the blanket over them both and opened the window wider, and they turned their chairs to face the garden.
"Ten," she said. "Rain on the shed roof." She passed the trumpet over. Nine was the gutter, gulping. Eight was the pear tree, every leaf tapping at a slightly different time. Seven was the blackbird shuffling deeper into the hedge.
Six: a car far off, hissing along the wet road. Five: the drainpipe's slow, unhurried plink. Four: Mom laughing in the kitchen, not hiding anything now. Three: a moth bumping the lampshade.
Two was Grandma's breathing, slow beside him, and Sam let the trumpet rest in his lap for that one.
One was all of it together, the whole soft roof of rain, and neither of them ever quite got as far as saying it.