Why I Wrote a Hero Who Hides Behind a Joke
In this clean single dad romance this hero hides behind a joke and I'm sure we all know someone like this.
Everybody has "that" friend. The friend who walks into a room and the whole mood changes. The one who has a story ready before anyone asks how the week went, who turns a flat tire into a five minute bit, who can make a waiting room laugh out loud. You know exactly who yours is. You probably thought of their name before you got to the end of that sentence.
Now think about the last time you asked that person how they were doing and actually waited for the answer.
That is a harder question, and it is the one that started this book.
The funniest person in the room is the last one anyone checks on
I have been on both sides of that. I have been the friend who leans on the funny one, and I have been the funny one who did not want anybody looking too close. There is a kind of comfort in being the person who lightens things up. Nobody asks follow up questions. Nobody sits you down and says, hey, you have been off lately. You get to be helpful instead of needy, and for a while that feels like the better deal.
The trouble is that it works. That is the part I wanted to write about. It is not a bad strategy, it is a very good one, and that is exactly why people stay in it for years.
Carson Waverly has been in it for four.
Meet the Waverly brother who never stopped performing
If you have read the first three books, you already know Carson as the one who cracks the joke at the family dinner table. He is the brother who breaks the tension. He teases Charlie, he gives Chan a hard time, he keeps everybody moving past the uncomfortable moment before it settles.
What none of them have looked at closely is when that started.
Carson lost his wife four years ago. He has a sixteen year old daughter named Colette, a metal shop full of half finished work, and a painting in the corner that he has not touched since the week before Nicole got her diagnosis. He tells his family he is fine. He says it in a way that makes them laugh, so they believe him, so they stop asking. Every joke buys him another week of nobody digging.
He is not lying to them, exactly. That is the thing I kept coming back to while I was writing him. Carson genuinely loves making people laugh. His humor is not a mask he puts on and takes off. It is really his. It just also happens to be the most effective wall he has ever built, and he knows it.
Why grief and humor live so close together
I think we get this wrong when we talk about grief. We picture somebody quiet and hollowed out, sitting in a dark room. And sure, sometimes it looks like that. But a lot of the time grief is loud and busy and very funny, because the person carrying it has figured out that if they keep the room laughing, nobody has time to notice their hands are shaking.
Humor and grief use the same muscle. Both of them are about looking straight at something awful and deciding what to do with it. One of them turns it into a punchline and the other turns it into silence, and the person doing the first one is often just the same person with better timing.
I wanted a hero whose smile was real. Not a fake grin covering a sad man, because that is a simpler story and it is not true to anybody I have actually known. Carson's warmth is authentic. His jokes land because he means them. And that is precisely what makes him so hard to help.
It takes a teenager and a stranger to get through
Two people in this book are not fooled.
The first is Colette. She has spent four years watching her father perform for the family, and she has been performing right alongside him, and she is sixteen and completely done with it. Teenagers have a low tolerance for pretending. She is angry, she is failing a class she used to love, and she is the only person in Holland Harbor willing to say out loud that her dad is not okay.
The second is Haley Johnson, who makes jewelry at the booth next to his at the farmers market. Haley did not know Carson before. She has no picture of who he used to be, so she does not measure him against it. She just watches him a few weeks in a row and notices that the joke always comes half a second too fast.
What Haley does not do is push. She does not try to fix him or gently suggest he talk to someone. She just quietly refuses to laugh on cue, and it turns out that is the one thing he has no defense against.
What the book is actually about
There is a moment late in this story where Carson finally goes back to that painting. He expects to feel like he is finishing something he owes his wife. What he finds instead is that the old brushstrokes are still under there, and everything he puts on top of them is new, and both of those things get to be true at the same time.
That is the whole book, honestly.
Grief does not come with an expiration date. Nobody gets to tell you that four years is long enough, or that two is too soon, or that you should be over it by now. But the flip side matters just as much, and it is the part we forget to say. There is no expiration date on your right to be happy either. Carson spent four years believing he had used up his turn. He had not. Nobody does.
If you have ever been the one making the jokes, or if you love someone who is, I think you will recognize him.See the rest of the books in the series here.
