Bob quit in August, the album came out in October, and he was washing windows by late November. Then December came and Bob threw his back out. He was still ailing when his ex-wife called with the news that his son Zach, 18, was in rehab after experimenting with heroin.
“Even when he went into rehab, I knew nothing about it,” Bob said. “I got a call from his mom where she said, ‘Zach’s getting out of rehab tomorrow, and we’ve got to get him out of here. He’ll be on a plane to come stay with you.’ I said, ‘OK.'”
Zach had visited Nashville a year prior to his rehabilitation stint, and he’d stayed in his father’s mind despite their geographical separation. When Zach flew into Nashville, Tim Carroll picked him up at the airport because Bob was still flat on his back. Then the immobile dad and the recovering son began living together in a one-bedroom apartment, sharing the same bed, in fact, until the end of January brought the chance to rent a larger place.
“In New Jersey, I’m sure Zach got the wrong impression about why I wasn’t there,” Bob said. “I don’t think his mom actively ran me down, but I don’t think she actively talked me up, either. This was a chance for him to see firsthand what my life was about. Prior to that, the hardest part of visiting him or him visiting me was that one of us had to leave.
“So when he came, I said ‘This is great. You’re here, and you’re not leaving, and I’m really glad about that.’ There was a huge amount of healing that took place between us during that time. Once, while he was here, he said to a friend of mine, ‘I’m really proud of what my dad does.'”
And this is when the shitty part of the story, made somewhat more palatable by a father/son reunion, gets worse. As Bob’s back got better, he went back to pressure washing and window washing. Zach made inroads in Nashville, got to know some of his dad’s friends and practiced guitar.
“One night I ran into Zach at a show,” Carroll said. “After the music was over, I gave him a ride home and talked with him a little bit. I remember him telling me that a couple of kids where he’d been living in Pennsylvania had died of a drug-related thing.”
In April, Zach caught what doctors thought was the flu. Bob took care of him, rubbed his son’s back one night when Zach complained of deep aches. The next morning, Zach was delirious, and yellow in complexion. Within hours, he was airlifted to Memphis, where specialists said his liver was quickly disintegrating.
“It was hepatitis, and he’d gotten it from a dirty needle,” Bob said.
Friends called and wrote and cried, and that helped. Rigby still breaks down when she tries to talk about it, about how Bob was the first of her circle of friends to lose a child.
“In the middle of all that, my friends and my family gave me something to lean on,” Bob says. “Without that, I don’t know…I don’t know what would have happened, what was possible.
“And the time that Zach lived here made his death…I don’t want to think about what would have happened had that he not been here for those four months. I’m not a person to talk about ‘The universe provides,’ but in that instance it was a good thing. Whether the universe provides those opportunities, I don’t know. But from my point of view, I’m glad.
“But also, I’m pissed. I’m pissed as hell about it, if that was the reason he was able to come down here. If that’s the truth, I’m pissed off at the universe for knowing this and not doing something about it. If you knew about it, why didn’t you fucking do something about it?”
