Page 66

Excellent Mouth

The prop was a lighter.

Not the white one from the bar's newest fan favorite signature cocktail—that stayed behind the counter where it belonged, nestled in its little velvet cradle like a relic with a marketing budget. This was a brushed silver Zippo from one of the upstairs immersive scenes, the one where Hakeem's character was supposed to flick it open during a monologue about fire and memory and then let the flame hold just long enough to make the audience nervous. He had pocketed it after his last understudy run without thinking, which was the kind of carelessness he would have mocked in another actor.

The Last Cue was quiet at three in the afternoon. The doors were locked, the bar unstaffed, the upstairs sets dim and waiting for the evening's first audience like a building holding its breath. Hakeem let himself in through the side entrance with the key Tabbi had given him during his first month, back when she still described him as "promising" without immediately qualifying it.

Tabbi was in the back office, which was less an office than a closet with ambitions. She sat behind a desk buried under call sheets, invoices, and a binder she referred to as The Bible, which contained every blocking note, lighting cue, and character breakdown for every scene The Last Cue had ever run. A takeout container sat near her elbow, half-eaten, forgotten, as food always was by those who treated eating as an interruption.

Hakeem held up the Zippo solemnly. "Returning stolen property."

Tabbi glanced at him over reading glasses she would deny owning. "You could have left it behind the bar."

"I wanted the dramatic gesture of a personal handoff."

"You wanted an excuse to be here on your day off."

He set the lighter on the corner of her desk, which left him standing in the doorway with no further props and no script. Tabbi watched him the way she watched everyone; the clinical attention of a woman who had spent twenty years in theater and could identify a bad entrance from across a room.

"Sit down," she said.

"I'm fine standing!” Hakeem sounded cheerful but hollow, like the jack-o-lanterns appearing throughout his neighborhood. It was barely the first week of October, and Los Angeles didn’t experience seasons, and yet.

"That wasn't a question."

He sat on the metal folding chair across from her, the one every employee referred to as the Confession Seat because nothing good had ever been said from it. Tabbi closed the binder and folded her hands.

"You've been off," she said.

"I'm always off. It's part of my charm."

"You've been off in a way that's not charming. You've been distracted. Your timing in the last two runs was sloppy, which I wouldn't mention if sloppy were normal for you. It isn't. You're usually sharp."

Hakeem opened his mouth.

"I'm not done." Tabbi leaned back. "You're one of the best performers I've had in this building. I've told you that, which I don't do often, because compliments make actors worse. But you're treating this place like it's the destination, and it isn't. It was never supposed to be."

The sentence hit him somewhere soft and undefended.

"The Last Cue is good," Tabbi said. "I built it. I'm proud of it. But it's a bar with theater attached, and you are not a bar actor. You are someone who should be on a screen or a stage that doesn't also serve mezcal, and every month you spend here acting like this is enough is a month you're not doing the thing you actually came to this city to do."

Hakeem stared at the lighter on her desk.

"I don't say that to be cruel," Tabbi continued. "I say it because I've watched a lot of talented people convince themselves that proximity to the work is the same as doing the work. It isn't. Being the best person at The Last Cue is not a career. It's a hiding place."

The room was quiet. The folding chair was doing something unpleasant to Hakeem's posture, which felt earned.

"Are you firing me?" he asked.

"I'm telling you to stop wasting yourself and do the thing that scares you. There's a difference."

Hakeem looked at her. Tabbi's face was not unkind, but it was not soft either. She had the expression of someone who had said something true and was now prepared to wait while the other person caught up.

"Layla says the same thing," he said quietly.

"Layla is smarter than both of us."

"She would agree with that."