As the narrator presses Emily’s dress and privately considers her response to a concerned teacher or counselor who has called about an undefined problem, she knows full well that she will not respond to the person’s request for a face-to-face meeting. The ironing serves as the backdrop for her reckoning of her life as a mother, but it does not indicate any kind of impending action. This lack of initiative and her passive belief that Emily will somehow find the right path subtly expose the narrator’s failings as a guardian and inability to fulfill the ideal of what a sacrificing, loving parent should be. Although the narrator accepts responsibility for her role in Emily’s unhappy development, at the same time she absolves herself of full responsibility, placing blame on environmental and social conditions that are unsympathetic to the needs of a single mother. She is unable to fully acknowledge the somber, tentative young adult Emily has become, because doing so would force the narrator to accept the ways her adult life has fallen short of expectation.