The Forecast for the Wedding
A free B1-level English story for language learners, readable online in 5 languages, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
Two weather forecasts disagree about the day of Maura's outdoor wedding, so she and her fiancé have to decide which one to trust.
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Maura's wedding is on Saturday, and on Wednesday morning she checks the weather for the ninth time. Her usual weather app shows a small, smiling sun. It says dry, twenty-four degrees, and a light wind. That is perfect for a ceremony in the garden.
Then Joel, her fiancé, holds up his phone. "A friend at work told me about a new forecast. It uses an AI model and thousands of local sensors. Look at this."
The screen shows a gray cloud. "Rain at four p.m. on Saturday," Joel reads. "Seventy percent."
"Seventy isn't a hundred," Maura says. "My app says sun."
"Your app has been wrong twice this month. This one was right yesterday."
They sit quietly with the two phones between them. Moving everything inside would mean a smaller room, no garden photos, and a lot of phone calls. Staying outside would mean hoping. Maura is a planner, and hoping has never been her best skill. But the seventy bothers her more than the thirty does.
"What's the worst that could happen?" Joel asks.
"Eighty guests in their best clothes, running for the door. And a very wet cake."
"Then what if we don't move inside? What if we just add a tent?"
Maura calls the venue that afternoon. A tent with open sides is possible, and it costs about the same as a good dress. "If it doesn't rain, we have wasted money," she says.
"And if it does, we have saved the day," Joel says. "I would rather waste money."
Maura says yes before she can think about it again.
On Saturday, the sky is bright blue. Her mother says the tent looks silly in the sunshine, and so does her cousin. Maura starts to doubt herself, too. She opens the old app one more time. Still a sun.
The ceremony begins at three, under the open sky, next to the white tent. At four o'clock, the band starts to play. At ten past four, a single drop falls on a table. Then another one falls. Then the rain arrives, hard and loud, and the guests run laughing under the tent.
"Seventy percent," Joel says, taking her hand. "Ten minutes late."
Maura doesn't look at either app. She pulls him onto the dance floor, where eighty wet and happy guests are already dancing.
