Pickup this morning. First cold one. Wet grass, breath showing, everybody in sweatpants. Hector's crew was short so I played the whole two hours, and off a corner I scored with my left foot, which I've done maybe three times in my life. Hector yelled "¡Golazo, Tulsa!" (a goal worth bragging about) and I did a little run like I was sixteen. My knee is telling me all about it now.

Then this afternoon I did what I said I'd do.

First, the Ryder Cup. Dad and I have watched golf together since I was little. Him in the recliner, me on the floor, him explaining what a bogey is for the four hundredth time like it was Scripture. The U.S. went into today down 10 to 6 and everybody said it was over. I had it on at Jo's with the sound off while she slept (nights again), and all afternoon the Americans kept winning matches, and winning matches, and it came all the way back. I kept reaching for the phone to say "Are you watching this?" That's our thing. That's what he says every time. "Are you watching this?"

So when it was over I called home. The machine picked up. Dad's voice: "You've reached the Reeses." He recorded that in 1993 and never changed it. He says "Reeses" like it has three e's.

I hung up. Then I called back and said, "Hey, Daddy. It's me. Were you watching? Ten to six and they came back. I thought about you the whole time. Okay. Bye. I love y'all."

It's 10:30. The phone hasn't rung. Third Sunday.

Jo got up at six for her shift and I told her all of it, and she put her hand flat on my back the way she does and said, "You left the door open. That's all you can do from here." Then she went to work.

I'm not giving up on him. He never gave up on me once on a field. I'll call next Sunday.

First day of fall. Jo worked last night, I worked today, and we met in the middle at 6:40 this morning at the coffee place on Colfax for twenty minutes and a blueberry muffin, split. Best twenty minutes of the week.

Too tired. More Sunday.

I wrote back.

Four drafts on yellow legal pads from the supply closet (sorry, Marty). The first one was twelve pages and mostly Bible verses, because I know them too, Mama. The second one was angry. The third one was so polite it could have been a thank-you note for a casserole. I threw all three away.

The fourth one is one page. It says that I love her. That I'm not asking her to agree with me, only to know me. That Jo works nights at the hospital and has a laugh you can hear from the parking lot, and I want Mom to know at least that much about her, because Jo is the one who was sitting on my steps in her scrubs when I pulled in from Tulsa. That I'll call on Sundays, and if nobody wants to talk about the hard thing, that's fine, I'll talk about the weather and the Broncos and I'll hang up. That I still have my shin guards.

I mailed it on my lunch break. Thirty-three cents. The cheapest and most expensive thing I've ever bought.

Nothing from Dad. That was two Sundays.

The letter came yesterday.

I knew her handwriting from across the lobby, through the little window in the mailbox. Same blue envelope she's used for every birthday card since I was nine, the ones with a two-dollar bill inside. No two-dollar bill this time. Four pages, both sides, on the lined stationery with the cardinals across the top.

I'm not going to put all of it here. Some of it is hers. But I want to write down pieces of it, so I remember it the way it actually is and not the way I'll turn it into later, better or worse.

She wrote: "I am not writing to argue with you. I have argued with God enough this week for both of us."

She wrote that she has read her Bible every night since that Sunday and prayed on it, and she doesn't have the answer I want, and she won't pretend she does. I didn't expect her to pretend. She never has. It's where I get it.

She wrote: "I keep thinking about the little girl who wouldn't take her shin guards off for supper."

She wrote: "I am not ready to meet her. I don't know when I will be." I've read that sentence about forty times. I keep landing on the word when. I showed Jo, and Jo said that's the right word to land on. She said in her job you learn to listen for the "when." She says families say it before they know they're going to.

She wrote that my father "is taking this hard and doesn't have the words, and you know your daddy, he never did." She wrote: "Give him time."

She wrote that she still has the program from every game I ever played, junior high through college, in the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, and that on Tuesday night she took every one of them out and looked at them.

And at the very end, underlined twice: "You are my daughter. That was never the question."

I don't know what to do with a letter that breaks your heart and holds it together in the same four pages. I put it in my Bible, which is maybe funny and maybe not.

Jo came off shift this morning and we sat on my kitchen floor with the letter between us and ate cereal out of the box and didn't say much. She read it twice and handed it back and said, "She loves you like a mom. She just doesn't know the plays yet."

Nine days. Nothing from Tulsa.

Dad calls every Sunday night. He has since my freshman year of college. Twenty minutes of sports, one question about my oil change, and then "Here's your mother." Sunday the phone didn't ring. I sat next to it through the whole second half of a football game I didn't care about. The Browns came back to the NFL this weekend after three years gone and lost 43-0 to Pittsburgh, and Dad would have had a LOT to say about that, and there was nobody to say it to.

Danny called Monday night from his dorm. He said Mom told him. Then he said, and I am quoting exactly, "So? Can I still come skiing at Christmas?" I cried so hard he thought the line went dead. Nineteen years old and he's the smartest one in the family.

At work everybody's standing around the TV in the break room watching the hurricane. Floyd. On the satellite picture it's bigger than Florida, and they're evacuating the whole coast, and the interstates are parking lots. I stood there with my coffee thinking about all those people in their cars, not knowing if the house will be there when they get back. (Not the same thing. I know it's not the same thing.)

Jo's been on nights. She leaves notes on my fridge when she comes by. Today's said: Eat something green. Jell-O does not count.

Denver is perfect today, seventy-five and blue. Which feels rude.

I've tried to write this four times.

I got to Tulsa Friday night at one in the morning. Mom had left the porch light on and a plate of chicken spaghetti in the fridge under foil with a note: Welcome home, sugar. Microwave 2 min. I ate it standing up at the counter in the dark.

Saturday was normal. Dad and I watched college football with the TV sound down and the radio on, which is how he's always done it. Danny was home and ate everything in the house. At supper Mom asked twice whether I was "meeting any nice young men at that church in Denver." I said I hadn't found a church yet. That part was true.

Sunday we went to church. I sat in the same pew I sat in when I was eight, between Mom and Danny, and sang "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" and meant it, which I know some people won't understand. I've never stopped praying. I just stopped telling anybody what about.

After Sunday dinner Dad went out to the garage and Danny went to a friend's, and it was just Mom and me doing the dishes. She washes, I dry. It's been that way since I could reach the counter.

I said, "Mama, I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it."

She said, "Are you pregnant?" and I laughed, which was not the plan.

Then I told her. That I'm gay. That I've known a long time, since high school if I'm honest, and that I've been lying to her on every phone call. That there's someone named Jo, and she's a nurse, and she's kind and funny and she takes care of me and I take care of her. That I wasn't telling her to hurt her. That I was telling her because I was tired of her not knowing me. I left the index cards in Denver. Jo was right about that.

Mom didn't say anything. She put down the plate she was washing and took off her yellow rubber gloves and laid them over the edge of the sink, one and then the other. Then she went to her bedroom and shut the door.

I finished the dishes. All of them. Then I dried them and put them away, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

She stayed in there the rest of the afternoon. At supper she made sandwiches and said grace and nothing else. Dad looked at me once across the table like he was trying to read a scoreboard from too far away, and I knew she'd told him.

Monday morning I left at six. Mom was up. She'd packed a cooler, turkey sandwiches and two Cokes and a bag of grapes, and she handed it to me at the door and hugged me, fast, and said "Drive careful." Dad said the same thing from the porch. He didn't come down the steps.

Ten hours home. Kansas is very long when you're crying.

Jo was sitting on my steps when I pulled in, still in her scrubs.

I don't know what happens now.

Leaving tomorrow right after work. Ten hours across Kansas if I only stop for gas.

Packed: running shoes, the church dress (Mom will ask), my old Bible, and a speech on six index cards that Jo says to leave at home. She read them tonight on my couch and handed them back and said, "You don't need cards. Say the true thing and then stop talking." I think that's also how she tells families about test results. She'd never say so.

She made me a tape for the drive. Shania, the Dixie Chicks, Sarah McLachlan, and then, right in the middle of side B where she figured I'd be somewhere around Salina, "Mambo No. 5," so I'd laugh in Kansas. She knows me.

She offered to drive down with me. I said no. It isn't a thing you bring someone to. You bring her after.

I still pray. I don't know how to explain that to some people up here, and I don't know how to explain the rest of it to the people down there. So I'm just going to drive and pray and say the true thing and stop talking.

Sunday pickup at City Park. For anybody new: every Sunday at 8 a.m. there's a game on the big field by the lake that's been going since before I moved here. Hector runs it. He's a roofer from Guadalajara with the best first touch I've ever seen on a grown man. There are two cab drivers from Ethiopia who are the best players out there, a dentist who's 55 and only passes backward, college boys who don't pass at all, and me. They call me "Tulsa" because of the first time I opened my mouth. Nobody out there knew I played in college until I stepped in front of a college boy and took the ball off him clean, and Hector yelled "¡Eso, Tulsa!" (that's it, that's the way) and that was that. I've been on Hector's team ever since.

I miss my team every day. But for two hours on Sunday I'm not missing anything.

After, Jo and I sat on the grass. She'd come to watch and read and mostly read. She put her book down and said, "So. Labor Day."

I said, "I'm telling Mom."

It's been coming a long time. Mom asks every single phone call, "Are you seeing anybody, sugar?" and every single time I say "No, ma'am," and I'm so tired of "No, ma'am." Twenty-three years of her knowing everything about me, down to my shoe size in fourth grade, and now there's this one whole person she doesn't know, and it's the person I'm happiest with.

Mom first. She's the one who would notice. Then Dad, or maybe Mom will want to tell Dad. I don't know how it'll go. Jo's parents in Minnesota have known since she was nineteen, and her mother sends ME birthday cards now. I don't expect that. I'd settle for a lot less than that.

Tonight my old college team opened its season without me.

I had it circled on the calendar at my desk like a crazy person. Marty (the lawyer I work for) saw it and asked if it was a court date. I said sort of.

For fifteen years, August meant two-a-days. Heat and sprints and blisters and ice bags and eating everything in the cafeteria and sleeping like a rock. This August I sat in a conference room with the air conditioning on high, putting exhibit stickers on deposition transcripts. My cleats are in a shoebox in my hall closet. I haven't opened it since Christmas.

On the way home I drove past a high school where the girls' team was practicing and I pulled over and sat in the car with the windows down for ten minutes just to hear the whistle. A dad in the parking lot looked at me like I might be a problem. I probably looked like one.

Kristy, who's a senior now, promised to e-mail me the score. It came at 11:40: won 2-1. Our new left back is a freshman, and Kristy said she got subbed at halftime. I'm a terrible person, because I was glad.

Coach B. always said, "There's life after the whistle, ladies. Make it a good one." I used to think she meant after the game.

First entry. Hi.

I've been reading other people's journals on here for a month, mostly at lunch, with my turkey sandwich and my monitor turned away from the hallway. Some of them are braver than anything I ever did on a field. So here's mine.

Where to start. July 10, I guess. The Rose Bowl.

Jo and I bought tickets for the final back in the spring, before anybody knew who'd be in it, because I said I'd regret it forever if I didn't go, and Jo said "Then we're going," like it was that simple. With Jo it usually is.

It was hot. There were more than ninety thousand people there, most of them girls in ponytails with flags painted on their cheeks, and every one of them could have been me at twelve. It was nothing-nothing for 120 minutes. In overtime China got a header on goal and Kristine Lilly was on the line and headed it back out. Everybody remembers the last kick. I'll remember that one. That's a defender's play. Nobody puts it on a poster.

Then penalties. Briana Scurry saved China's third kick and the stadium made a noise I'd never heard before. Then Brandi Chastain's kick went in and the whole place came apart, and I grabbed Jo and hugged her, and I didn't look around first.

That's the thing. I didn't look around first. I have been looking around first my whole life.

Ninety thousand people, and not one of them cared. I think that's where this journal starts.

Jo	The girlfriend. A nurse, three twelve-hour nights a week. From Minnesota. Taller than me, and cannot kick a ball to save her life.
Mom	Tulsa. She washes, I dry. Writes letters on cardinal stationery.
Dad	Tulsa. Coached my softball team. Calls on Sundays. Usually.
Danny	My little brother, 19, in college. Eats everything. Smartest one of us.
Hector	Runs the Sunday pickup game in City Park. Named me "Tulsa."
Coach B.	My college coach. Still sends the alumni newsletter. Still right about most things.
Kristy	A senior on my old team. E-mails me the scores.
Marty	The lawyer I work for. Good boss. I owe him some legal pads.

Want to know when I update? E-mail me with NOTIFY in the subject and I'll put you on the list. Thank you to everybody who's already on it, and to the reader in Ohio who wrote after the Labor Day entry to say her mother took two years and now sits next to her in church. I printed that out. It's on my fridge next to Jo's notes. My family doesn't know this page exists, and I'd like to be the one who decides when they do. Please don't forward my entries. If you know me in real life, be kind.