Father knows less

My WIFE packed on Friday and flew out on Saturday, leaving behind mascara marks on her pillow, two sullen children and me, a guy who considers cigars a vegetable. Apparently, I have a lot to learn.

“You pour the detergent in here and the softener in here,” she told me before going, so as not to leave me in a lurch.

“Where do I put the dishes?” I asked.

“This is a clothes washer,” my wife explained patiently.

“You sure?” I said.

She is leaving us, jetting off to Florida with that toddler of hers for a 10-day visit to the grandparents. You know Florida: tourists and hurricanes. Disney World and serial killers. An odd mixture of things to do and things to flee.

“Now who’s gonna take care of us?” asks the little girl as we drop her mother at the airport.

“Maybe me?” I say.

“We’re gonna starve,” notes her brother.

I hate to be a cliche, but from the moment she leaves, we see the predictable hodgepodge of futile fatherly endeavors. I forget to put grapes in the school lunch. I over-bake the baked potatoes. I mistake the laundry for the mail. At one point -- gasp! -- I mix the colors and the whites.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Are you, like, trying to kill us?” asks the boy after an omelet that tastes a little like gin.

“He’s doing the best he can,” explains the little girl, hoping to convince herself. “Aren’t you, Dad?” Well, maybe.

Three days into this fiasco and they both have the gloomy, world-wise expressions of Hansel and Gretel at Back-to-School Night. “Yes, that’s my father,” they mumble to their friends. “No, I’m afraid he hasn’t been taking his lithium.”

On the kitchen door, my wife has left a calendar of activities that I must remember. Tennis on Monday. Doctor appointment on Tuesday. Wednesday, some sort of church thingy. She’s neatly penciled in every carpool trip, every activity. Whew, we do a lot of things.

“OK, everybody needs to help out a little,” I say, one day, exasperated by the million tasks it takes to keep a house going.

“You mean, like, help?” asks the boy.

“Yeah, help,” I explain.

“Oh, man,” he groans, as if asked to paint the Brooklyn Bridge.

He’ll be my floor man. It’s a vital role, keeping the floors of our house free of filth. There are gobs of pet and teen hair. We are, by some counts, L.A.’s leading hair repository. Basically, a week’s worth of our hair would nest a thousand condors.

I introduce the boy to the broom and tell him to start sweeping.

“Sweep?” he belches, like he just swallowed a lime.

“Yeah, sweep,” I say.

“What about me?” asks the little girl.

“You?” I say. “I appoint you ... Goddess of All Laundry.”

“Thanks,” she says, excited.

“You’re quite welcome.”

I introduce the little girl to the washing machine. I show her where the detergent goes and the little tray where you add the fabric softener.

“Where do the clothes go?” she finally asks.

“Now you’ve got me,” I say, scratching my head.

My wife never got that far on our lesson, on account of I kept making wiseguy remarks and, she eventually shrugged and called me “a smart-mouthed $!*%$&#$!# who watched too many episodes of ‘MASH’ as a kid.” All true, of course.

So as I try to figure out where the clothes go, I look into the little girl’s face. My goddess of laundry has gone to that place in her head where she remembers her mother, the pretty woman with the Marlo Thomas eyes who always seemed to know where things were and what to do with them. A capable person. A person of significant charm and knowledge.

“Lord, where is she now?” the little girl asks in a little insta-prayer. “How could she abandon us like this when the softball uniform needs washing and the croutons are all gone? How could she leave us with this man who seems just now to have landed on this Earth, and doesn’t even know where the dry cleaners is? Who can’t even make a decent salad? How?”

“Dad?” the new goddess of laundry finally says.

“Yes?”

“I really miss Mom,” she whispers.

Amen to that.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.