Tim Gautreaux's "Same Place, Same Things" is one of the best short stories I've ever read.

Excerpt:

The next morning the sky was as hard and expressionless as a pawnbroker's face. At eight o'clock the temperature was ninety-one, and the repairman had already welded a piston rod in Amite and was headed south. When he passed the woman's lane, he forced himself not to look down its rutted surface. He had dreamed of her last night, and that was enough, he thought. Times were so hard he could afford only his dreams. A half mile down the road he began working at pouring new babbitt bearings for an old Dan Patch engine. The owners of the farm left him alone so they could oversee a group of inexperienced pickers, and at nine-thirty, while he was turning the blower for the forge, she came out of the brush to the north, carrying a clear glass jug of lemonade.

"I'll bet you're dry," she said, giving him the jug and a tin cup.

"You're an awful friendly lady," he said, pouring himself a drink and looking at her slim waist, her long hair.

"I can be friendly when I want to be." She rested her hand on his damp shoulder a moment and let it slide off slowly.

They talked while he worked the forge. He tried to tell her about his children, but she seemed not to be interested. She wanted to know where he had been and where he was going. She wanted to know how it was to live on the road, what people were like in different places. "Do you stay in tourist courts every night?" she asked, wide-eyed.

By the time he had finished his repair, she had told him that she had just buried her third husband, that she had never been a hundred miles from the spot they were standing in, and that she didn't care if she never saw another strawberry for the rest of her days. "Sometimes I think it's staying in the same place, doing the same things, day in, day out, that gets me down. Get up in the morning and look out the window and see that same rusty fence. Look out another window and see that same willow tree. Out another and see that field. Same place, same things, all my life." She heard a distant train whistle and looked off toward it, caught up in the haunting sound.