The letter was signed Edna Cutler, and there was a street address.
I put the letter in my pocket, said to Ethel Wells. “When would I be able to get a train for Shreveport?”
“Must it be a train?”
“A bus will do all right.”
She reached into a cubbyhole beneath the counter which ran on one side of her desk, pulled out a bus schedule, opened it, and handed it to me.
“I see where I made my mistake,” she said.
“What?”
“I should have ordered my stockings by mail and given my home address.”
“Why don’t you try it?” I asked.
She was holding her lead pencil in her right hand, making aimless little diagrams across the page of her shorthand notebook.