“Erin?” My name jolted me out of a daydream. “Would you like to start?”

I took a drag from my cigarette and forced a smile at the counselor. “Sure,” I replied, blowing smoke out the side of my mouth. “My dad was always there for me, till he disappeared one day. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right?” Nods of sullen acknowledgement circled the other seated members of the group under the fluorescent lights of the church basement.

“It might help to talk about what happened,” offered the counselor. “If you’re comfortable with that. Many people here had fathers who’ve abandoned their family and-”

“Nah,” I lazily blew smoke into the air. “I never said he abandoned me. He disappeared.” I shook my head. “It’s actually a little ridiculous.”

“Would you like to tell us the story?”

I dropped my cigarette and ground it out with my heel. “Sure. Why not? We lived up near LaCrossier. That’s where I grew up. My father owned a vineyard there. It wasn’t big or anything, but we made and sold our own wine. Business was booming. He’d just secured a bank loan to expand the vineyard.”

Taking a new cigarette out, I lit it and felt the smoke roll into my lungs. “My sister and I used to play among the vines. Sometimes we’d dig around playing games and find what we called buried treasure. I found an interesting piece one day,” I continued. “Usually, I’d find buttons or pieces of brass, but this time...I found an old knife. I took it over to papa who was plowing the adjoining field to our property, the field he had just purchased.”

I blew smoke from my nostrils and looked around at everyone’s polite disinterest. “Giving the find to papa, he told me it was actually a bayonet. He went on to say that a massive battle had been fought on this land for miles in each direction, about a hundred years ago. That’s why I kept finding ‘buried treasure.’ Apparently millions of artillery shells had landed all over the place. Nature had reclaimed the land and the scars of war healed over time...or something like that.”

“The very next day, I watched his tractor plow strips of the new field. At noon, I’ll never forget that, I ran over to call him to lunch. He couldn’t hear me over the tractor’s engine. The vehicle turned and started plowing back towards my direction when a mountain of dirt was suddenly kicked up into the sky. I was thrown back and lay staring up at the sky with a loud ringing in my ears.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cigarette was shaking in my hand. “My hearing came back within a couple days. It took a little longer to understand what had happened. My father told me millions of artillery shells had cratered our property. What he didn’t mention was that not all of them exploded. The field he bought, turns out that it had some unexploded shells buried in it.”

I chuckled slightly. “So, my father didn’t leave me, he just hit some unexpected ordnance and...disappeared.” I looked down at my hand. I’d crushed the smoke in my grip. Before I could grab another, I noticed everyone silently staring at me. I lit up and offered a friendly smile. “So, who’s next?"