They host a lot of parties at our house, where people sing and dance and sometimes skinny-dip in the ocean. One time they had a naked sprinkler midnight party. They turned on two sprinklers, and at midnight all the women got naked and ran through the water. They have poker parties and bunco parties.

“Nah. They don’t need to tame it down,” Marco said. “They’re living it up.”

“They live it up, that’s for sure, and they haven’t been arrested for over a year for disturbing the peace, so that’s a plus.”

“Certainly is.”

“The chief is their friend. He arrests and releases them quickly. It’s all a big joke. One time my mother grabbed his handcuffs and she and my aunts arrested him. They drove him home to his wife. The chief thought it was hilarious.”

Marco is half Mexican. His great-grandfather moved to California from Mexico. His grandfather was born in California. The sprawling family owns hundreds of acres of farmland in California and a construction business. Marco’s father is a college professor in California. He teaches math. His mother is an artist. Marco was born in Newport Beach and joined the military for eight years after high school. He went to college through the military, then went to veterinarian school.

He is six three, with black hair, dark eyes. That over-used saying, “Tall, dark, and handsome,” was made for Marco. But he’s not a slick gorgeous. He is not a vain gorgeous. He can’t help his face. He can’t help his broad build. He can’t help that he looks like a Mexican cowboy who should be that rough-and-tough hero in a movie. He’s even a bit scarred up. One scar is from wrestling with Laredo, one of his four brothers. They crashed over their toy box, and both ended up bleeding from their foreheads.

Another scar is on his lip. That one was from riding his bike double with his brother Manuel. They crashed.

A scar on his neck is from a skateboarding accident. He and Christof were skateboarding off a dirt cliff. He took a bullet in his leg in Iraq, and when he’s tired he limps a little. He has shrapnel embedded in his left forearm, so he’s had a tattoo painted over it with the name of their family’s farm Campos de Oro, Golden Fields, to turn “bullet fragments into something better.”

He has had some posttraumatic stress issues, he’d told me, from the war. He walks late at night on the island to get rid of the memories he wants to get rid of. He lost his best friend in Iraq, which was devastating. He stopped drinking entirely five years ago because after he returned from Iraq he drank too much because of flashbacks and nightmares and general anxiety from the war. His family, a few war buddies, and three of his best friends intervened.

“I was defensive, angry, told them all to go to hell. Except,” he said, “my mother. I would never tell my mother to go to hell. But they were right. I was drinking too much. So I stopped. And I finally started dealing with what I saw, what I did, what I was ordered to do, in combat in Iraq.”