I opened the basement closet door in my own house on Scottsville Road with a flashlight in one hand and a rolling pin in the other, because I am seventy four, and I am not a fool. Inside, on metal shelves where I had once stacked canning jars, sat four banker boxes, a laptop, and a black plastic bin full of cheap cell phones, each with a label in the neat handwriting of my grandson. I am Ruth Ann Sizemore, a retired school bookkeeper, and I knew within one minute that the whole of Golden Hands Home Care LLC had been living under my feet for a year, and I had been baking cornbread right over its head.
The boxes held patient files for people I knew. Mrs. Pruitt across the street. Mr. Daniels on the corner. The Hendersons, who had been in the nursing home since 2022 and could not have received a single home visit. Every file carried my signature, copied with a steady hand from my church check register. A yellow sticky note was pasted on the lid of the laptop. It read, in the writing of Kyle, Do not let Grandma upstairs. And below that, a second name. Tanya Burris, with a phone number in Nashville.
I carried the laptop upstairs, set it on my kitchen table, and called the number that Rodney, the kind man at the IRS, had given me. By two that afternoon, a quiet woman in a gray blazer was sitting at my table drinking my coffee. She was Special Agent Maria Soto of the Inspector General for Health and Human Services, and she had been investigating Golden Hands for eight months. “Mrs. Sizemore,” she said, “you are not a suspect. You are the first witness we have found who did not run.”
A letter from the IRS gave one retired school bookkeeper the length of a Thursday afternoon to bring her grandson back to the truth in Bowling Green.
I gave my terms to my grandson at six o clock that evening, in my kitchen, with Agent Soto at the end of the table and the smell of cornbread in the air. “Kyle Sizemore, I raised your father. I held you at your christening. I am not going to let you go to prison alone. You will tell this woman everything. You will name Tanya Burris. You will give back every dollar you can, and you will move out of my basement tomorrow. And you will look at me when you answer. I have never raised my voice in this kitchen, and I do not intend to begin tonight.”
Kyle sat at the table with his hands between his knees, thirty one years old, in a rumpled work shirt. “Grandma, I lost eighty thousand dollars betting on football last year,” he said, in a low, ashamed voice. “Tanya said she had a business that could fix it. She said no one would ever check an old woman. I told myself I was only borrowing your name for a little while.” He looked up. “I should have borrowed money from you instead. You would have given it to me. That is the worst part.”
But panic came over him all at once. Kyle suddenly lunged for the laptop on the table, snatched it up with both arms, and ran for the back door, meaning to throw it into the river behind the house. He yanked the door open. On my back steps stood Mrs. Pruitt and Mr. Daniels, who had come across the yard with a plate of banana bread. Agent Soto rose from her chair. And my terrier, Biscuit, planted himself on the threshold, barking.
Kyle stopped on the porch with the laptop clutched to his belly and two elderly neighbors facing him in their cardigans, the banana bread still warm in the hands of Mrs. Pruitt. She did not raise her voice. “Kyle, I held you when you were a baby at the church picnic. Whatever you did, Ruth Ann will forgive you faster than I would. Put that thing down and come inside.” Kyle looked at the plate. Tears sprang to his eyes. He turned around and set the laptop on the counter.
The consequences were firm and humane. The IRS dismissed the debt as identity fraud, and the Medicare billing was voided. Tanya Burris was arrested in Nashville, and her ring was dismantled. Kyle pleaded guilty and cooperated, and because of that cooperation, he received three years of probation and a restitution order, with a requirement to attend a gambling counseling group every week. He moved into a rented room over a hardware store and paid me back, a little at a time, in envelopes with notes.
In the name of my husband Carl, who passed in 2016, I started the Carl Sizemore Fund. It pays for identity theft protection and credit freezes for seniors and for legal help and counseling for families hurt by gambling, in Warren, Simpson and Allen counties. In the first year we protected two thousand one hundred seniors and counseled seventy two families. One was a seventy six year old retired teacher from Franklin who held her new credit freeze letter against her chest and said she had not slept through the night in a year.
On a warm Saturday in September, I set up my bake sale table on the lawn of First Methodist in Bowling Green, under a blue tent, with a tray of lemon bars and a hand lettered sign. Kyle came across the grass in a clean shirt, carrying a box of paper plates, and set them down without a word. Mrs. Pruitt bought three pies. Mr. Daniels bought a dozen cookies for no reason. When the sale was done, Kyle counted the cash into the tin, every dollar, and handed it to me, and I kissed his cheek, and the tent flapped softly overhead while the Methodist bells began to ring noon across the whole of the green.
