It would not be long before Love returned to the cemetery to bury Alphonso.
A green truck carrying the grounds crew led the procession from Roosevelt Road. As it neared a church at a corner near Mannheim Road, the truck broke ranks in a plume of blue smoke.
Geese squawked as the procession approached the grave alongside Gina’s. A van playing gospel music could be heard across the cemetery. A dump truck filled with dirt waited nearby.
A green carpet and plastic folding chairs surrounded Alphonso’s grave and spilled over Gina’s. Pallbearers moved in silence and the mourners gave them distance as they carried Alphonso’s casket.
Love took her seat next to the grave, while others stood around Gina’s headstone, which had arrived an hour earlier and had been set off to the side. Some people posed next to it for photos, others bent down to trace the etched marble as Love cried a few feet away.
A preacher spoke, his first words drowned out by an airplane.
“As much as it has pleased the almighty God in his wise providence to remove from this world the soul of brother Alphonso Love, we therefore commit his body to the earth. Earth to earth —
A man nearby uttered, “Ashes to ashes.”
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” the preacher said.
A winch kicked in and the coffin was lowered into a thin concrete box. Nearby, plants hung from hooks next to tall headstones and swayed in the breeze. The preacher told anyone who needed a note for work to contact the funeral home, and then he stepped away.
Relatives laid flowers on the casket. Alphonso’s 7-month old daughter clutched hers, her pudgy arm out stretched over the casket, and refused to loosen her grip.
The man holding her shook her arm a bit but the daughter still refused. Her face was blank. Then she let go.
