Day Two

What do you wear when you're about to meet a retired beauty queen?

In the living room of our friend JM's house, I dug through my duffel bag. My wrinkled road-trip clothes seemed hardly worthy of meeting someone who almost became Miss America. I couldn't wear anything too old, or anything mismatched, or anything with holes in it. Because she might not talk to us. She might look out her peephole and think we were a couple of hitchhikers looking for a place to use the bathroom.

It had to be over 90 degrees outside, so I needed to balance looking somewhat adult with not being miserably hot on the way there. I finally settled on a pair of not-too-stained khakis and a yellow tank top. This would have to do.

Sarah and I left Des Moines around noon. This would put us in Elwood by 2:30, solidly after church hour, when Darcy Benton and her family were sure to be home.

We had a list of questions to answer: How had winning Miss Iowa changed Darcy's life? What did she do now? How did she feel about being the most famous person in town? How did she fit -- or break -- the stereotypes of being a beauty queen?

About halfway there, I turned to Sarah with a start.

"What if she doesn't live there anymore!" I said.

Somehow, this idea hadn't occurred to us.

We looked at the digital picture of the town's welcome sign that we had taken the day before: "'Home of Darcy Benton, Miss Iowa 1986,'" I read aloud. "So either she lives there now, or she was just born there."

We recalled how paint-peeled the sign had been, and how old-looking, and kept driving.

Just west of Davenport, we exited I-80 onto a small country road heading north. We drove through Dixon and Wheatland and Toronto, and past miles and miles of corn. The road narrowed and curved, and in a town called Lost Nation, we turned right, onto county road 136. We had been here before, the road that led to Elwood.